


White Star Winter Orbit

by Beth Winter (BethWinter)



Series: Winter Orbit [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Alexander Pierce bashing, Assassination, Backstory, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Cold War, Communism, Complete, Delusions, Domestic Violence, Emotional Manipulation, False Identity, Gen, Guns, Hallucinations, Hydra (Marvel), Identity Issues, Identity Porn, Implied/Referenced Torture, Infidelity, Loss of Identity, Manipulation, Medical Experimentation, Medical Torture, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Mental Disintegration, Mind Games, Mind Manipulation, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Other, Post-World War II, Psychological Torture, Red Room, Russian characters, Smoking, Soviet Union, Spies & Secret Agents, Unreliable Narrator, Winter Soldier POV, Women Being Awesome, background sexual harrassment, literally the most evil character I've ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-21
Updated: 2014-12-21
Packaged: 2018-02-26 12:16:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2651750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BethWinter/pseuds/Beth%20Winter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Between the fall and the monsters, the Winter Soldier is in orbit. This is what happens in the Red Room. These are the people who make him what and who he becomes. </p><p>Inspired by comics canon, in particular Ed Brubaker's Captain America issue 11, which included pages from the Winter Soldier file, and far too many Cold War books. Because HYDRA in the movie uses the Winter Soldier as a blunt instrument, and blunt instruments do not become legends.</p><p>Please take the warnings seriously. This is not a happy story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. REBIRTH

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a tribute to William Gibson's Red Star, Winter Orbit short story. Cyberpunk forever.
> 
> This story is mostly MCU-compliant up to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, while taking inspiration from the initial Captain America: Winter Soldier comics written by Ed Brubaker, who came up with General Karpov and Alek Lukin. I've tweaked the comic timeline though, so the Winter Soldier's first mission is in late 1951. This story spans from 1949 to 1985, with an epilogue set in present-day MCU after CA:TWS and a yet-unwritten recovery arc.
> 
> The questions I asked: Why is the Winter Soldier a legend? And who created him?
> 
> With thanks to Fyre, who stuck with this story through all its darkness.

He's curled up in a small iron box. He likes his small iron box. It has five sides and one opening, which means he sees everyone who can hurt him.

He sees the girl sitting on the floor by the door, under the glass case that displays newspaper clippings. The largest is a photo of a tractor surrounded by beaming children. Under it, a broad-shouldered man in a greatcoat smiles in a paternal manner, thick mustache bristling.

She watches him with the unwavering, unblinking attention of a sniper. Only her fingers move, flipping over a small piece of metal on a chain. One of those labels they put on soldiers to identify the corpses. Tagging them like dogs, or making sure they live forever, depending on who you ask and in what language. Death medal. Immortality tag.

He wonders if it belonged to her lover. She looks like someone who lost a lover. Her lips are soft and full, but her eyes are hard. Her hair is gray-brown and disheveled.

He wishes she had not taken away the lid of his box. He wonders if he broke her hip when he threw her across the room, whether that's why she's sitting so still.

"Do you understand Russian?" she asks.

He thinks about it, then realizes the fact he's thinking about it determines the answer. He forces his throat to relax enough to speak. "Yes."

"Good. We weren't sure."

Each word sparks more thoughts, until he recognizes them as curiosity. "You weren't sure?"

She leans forward, elbows propped on her thighs. Her hip isn't broken. "You were found in the aftermath of a battle with the Germans. There were many soldiers there, Soviet, English, American, French. We couldn't identify you. You must have lost your death medal in the snow. And then you were asleep for a long time."

"Asleep?"

"Dead."

He copies her, leaning forward, his heels resting on the floor of the room, not floor of the box. She's wearing a gray uniform and brown boots. He's naked except for one arm, which is covered with shining metal.

"I don't remember," he says. "Can you tell me what I don't remember?"

"Cold sleep. The box you're in is called a cryogenic chamber. You were severely wounded, and once you were defrosted, the doctors couldn't save your arm. This is a prosthetic."

He opens his fingers, then closes them. Prosthetic does not fit this arm.

"A very advanced prosthetic," she says.

"You experimented on me."

"The doctors experimented on you," she agrees. "We had a choice. To experiment on you or to bury you."

He opens his fingers again. "Do I have a choice?"

"You are a human being," she says softly. "Of course you have a choice." She flips the tag into the air, then catches it. "The Motherland is recovering from the great war. Strong men are needed everywhere. But I don't know if you'll remain strong, without our doctors. And you know nothing. It might be hard to find a place for a man with no name."

"You have an offer."

She smiles, and it's a sniper's smile. "I don't. I'm just one of General Karpov's pets. I'm here for the company."

"For my company?" He tries to imagine her in a nurse's cap and cape.

"Mine. The boys here, they don't understand."

He has not seen many people in the span his memory encompasses, but the ones who brought him food and sedated him and caused him pain have all looked at least ten years older than her. Maybe she just looks sixteen because of how short she is, barely up to his shoulder.

He nods slowly. He wants her to keep talking, because it's better than the blankness of his thoughts.

"They don't understand the cold." She touches the shadows on the tops of her cheekbones, and he understands it's frostbite. "They don't understand the killing. They don't understand what it takes to pull a trigger and watch someone a hundred meters away die."

He puts together what she told him. A great war is over. He died, and the people she killed died, and there was snow and cold and ice, and little girls had to pick up guns. "You were very young?"

She flips over the little tag. "I was fourteen. Stalingrad."

"Germans." He rubs the sides of his head. "No sense. No sense. I remember Stalingrad and Hitler and Russian language, and I don't remember my name."

"Names aren't important." She crawls forward, hands and knees, tag clutched between her fingers. "I lost mine, when my parents died. They told me to pick a name in the orphanage, and I wanted Iliana like Comrade Lenin's father, but there was one Iliana already, so I picked Aliana. And then in the war we weren't supposed to use our own names, so I picked again and I was White Star."

He copies the way she moves, just slower. "That's a good name."

"You can pick a name too."

Even thinking about it sends stabs through his head. "You can pick a name."

Close up, her eyes are mousy brown. She crouches, rises, offers him her hand.

"Yakov," she says. "Yakov Ivanovich Barsky."

"My name is Yakov," he tries out. "It's nice to meet you." He takes her hand.

She claps his shoulder after she pulls him upright. "Let's get you dressed. Then you can meet the General. You'll like him, he likes strays."

He looks down at their joined hands. "Aliana? What's this?"

"A talisman," she tells him.

The upper line of writing is scratched out, but he can just make out the numbers, and he commits them to memory. The immortality tag says 32557038.

*

General Karpov's Red Room is an old factory building. The machinery that wove strips of cloth all across the great hall left for beyond the Urals during the war, and it never returned. Instead there are power generators and cryogenic facilities and training installations for the curiosities General Karpov collects. The upper galleries around the hall are still labeled with names of fabrics and patterns, the paint peeling. The cigarette smoke leaves a sticky yellow layer over the paint. Edvin and Zhenia, the doctors, banished smoking from the main floor. It was messing up their experiments. Their magic.

"Do you think the moths will evolve? Switch from eating wool to eating weapons?" Yakov asks idly. The residue of Zhenia's latest concoction is still clouding his brain, two more hours until he's allowed to test whether it worked to make his reflexes faster.

"Evolution is a reactionary capitalist theory," Aliana says. "Nurture, comrade. Nurture shapes genes."

They're perched above the upper gallery, on rusty fittings that once held floodlights.

"Aren't they both theories?"

"Comrade Stalin said that Comrade Lysenko is right. Thus this is right, not theory." She turns her head towards him in the shadows. "You must remember this, Comrade Barsky."

He draws a breath. The air is heavy with the smoke of her cigarette.

"Kalinin isn't here. I know what to say when he is here." He has passed several examinations by the political officer, after Aliana's careful coaching. He does not like the colorless man and his rolling, sharp sentences. There are too many words and concepts and Yakov is more comfortable with the politics that Aliana teaches him up here in the dark. Motherland matters. Family matters. He will defend them to the death, of course.

She shrugs. "Kalinin has ears. If you don't say anything, you will not say things where he can hear."

A flash of memory from two days ago. Kalinin stooping over Aliana's desk, hand too close to her arm, quizzing her about the role of women in building socialism throughout generations. The watery eyes fixed between the second and third button of her uniform jacket.

"I can break his legs," he says softly. Sound does not carry up here. "I'm an unpredictable experiment."

She lights another cigarette. "Not a good idea. They would send a new one. Maybe a new one harder to convince we are of course loyal to the Party. General Karpov does not have friends."

"He has you. He has Alek and Masha and Zhenia and the brain boys." He remembers the way the General walks across the hall, all his special people coming over to report. Last time, Aliana dragged him to his feet as well, and the General told him his progress was very good. Not just good, very good. It felt warm.

"We're not friends. We're children." The glow at end of the cigarette throws the pitted skin on the tops of her cheekbones into sharp relief when she inhales. "Be careful with Kalinin."

The public announcement speakers coughs several times before emitting a tinny melody. Canteen opening time.

Aliana lets her cigarette drop, swirling down on the gusts of wind from the cryochamber cooling engines. In the darkness, it looks like a falling star.

*

"So if the contact isn't where you were told he would be, what is your first action?" Alek is trying for a teacher's face, as calm and icy as the General, but his eyes are sparkling with eagerness. He is only nineteen years old, in his second year of the Graduate School, and he has almost as much patience as Aliana in filling Yakov's head with everything that isn't instinct and firearms and passing as an American.

Yakov taps his metal fingers. The motors are running smoothly. Masha will be happy. "Check for traps."

"No. You're wounded. The first priority is stopping your condition from deteriorating. If you're fit, you can fight your way out of a trap."

"I can always fight out of a trap."

Alek grins. "Even you aren't unbeatable. What if there's a sniper?"

Yakov shrugs. "Snipers aren't unbeatable."

"Don't tell Zvezda."

Alek grins, and Yakov nods. Zvezda is Aliana, the White Star of Stalingrad. Zhenia says that for two years after the General collected her, once the siege was broken, she didn't answer to any other name. And her ears are sniper-sharp, so even twenty meters away she turns from her desk to look at them.

"Did you ever see a sniper defeated?" Alek asks. "In the war?"

"I don't remember the war."

Alek turns and gives Aliana a little wave. She snorts and bends over her paperwork. Yakov has been watching them, like he watches everyone else in the Red Room, and he watches the way Alek watches Aliana. Puppy crush, he thinks in English, and can't find the Russian words to fit.

"Your body will remember for you," Alek says. "I saw you train. If you can get this into your brain to keep you long enough to let it, American."

American. Amerikanets, because of the way his English sounds. He is only Yakov, Yasha, Comrade Barsky, to one person. His eyes follow her around the room as he listens to Alek's lecture. The division of attention is a sniper's trick.

"Will I be alone on a mission?" he asks, once his answers have satisfied the boy.

Alek shrugs, smiles, spreads his hands. "General Karpov says everyone is alone on a mission. It's cold out there."

"When?"

"I don't know." His eyes are brown, guileless. A squirrel who squeezes through prison bars to keep the captive company. "When the General needs you to go on a mission. Soon."

Alek deposits him in Masha's care, for another test of his arm. She approves of the way the motors are running and disapproves of the way he stiffens when she binds him to the chair.

He lets his mind wander while she pokes and prods and hurts. He considers the way the Red Room is divided between the employees and the General's children, the inner clique of bright misfits Karpov found during the war. Masha, who hums some songs only when Kalinin the political officer is not around. Zhenia, who hides a still in plain sight among the clutter of his laboratory and once tested a new batch of moonshine on Yakov, the only alcohol he remembers tasting. Edvin and Soso and Luda and Alek and Aliana who is called Zvezda and who chose all her names and his.

Then he faints from the pain.

*

Berlin is easy like a dream, easy like killing a fly, not a car full of American soldiers. The culmination of two years' training feels like swimming through warm water in the mask that is his American persona. Behind the American's eyes, Yakov watches with incredulity.

He tells it to Aliana, who swats his shoulder on a rooftop in East Berlin. "It's easy because we taught you well."

In the street below, people are hurrying through the gloom of morning, the curfew barely over. He points the index finger of his metal hand at one of them, tracking by sight.

"Bang," Aliana whispers.

"Bang," he agrees. "Next time, here again?"

"Maybe. Maybe some other place where American soldiers infest places where they aren't wanted. Tonight was good."

"Useful?" he asks. "Who were they?" He did approach the car to make sure the targets were dead. He remembers the way glass shards cut into the driver's eyes, vitreous humor running down his cheeks.

"You don't need to know. I don't need to know."

"You know."

She grins, and the flash of her teeth replaces the flash of the glass shards. "That's because I'm too stubborn. Leave the knowing to me, Yasha. I'll take care of you."

"Yes, Zvezda."

She passes over the bottle of black market samogon. The liquor burns his mouth and seizes up his lungs.

"You've graduated," she says while he concentrates on breathing. "I picked a new codename for you. You're now the Winter Soldier."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dog tag (English) = death medal (Russian) = immortality tag (Polish). The number is Bucky's.
> 
> Political officers were charged with guarding the ideological purity of Soviet troops, making sure they did not stray from the Party line, even if it involved Lysenko's theories that if you removed leaves from a plant, the seeds would grow into leafless plants.
> 
> Zvezda = star (Russian).
> 
> Please tell me if I missed any warnings - I'll add them immediately.


	2. RESCUE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things spiral, and he's never free. 1951 to 1953.

Over the two years of Yakov's training, Kalinin has gained new stars on his shoulders and new boys to do his bidding. Three of those train their guns on Yakov the moment he steps out of the car that brought them from the airport.

He freezes, not because of the guns but because of Aliana's hand in the middle of his back. Her fingers are tense, furious.

"I did not approve this, comrade," she says. "General Karpov's orders are that all actions concerning the Soldier are to be confirmed with me."

Kalinin's colorless eyes gleam. "General Karpov is not the authority when it comes to political purity, comrade. Your experiment crossed the border into an enclave of German fascists and American degenerates. Until he has been debriefed, I must consider him a dangerous corruptive influence. You know who made him."

There are people behind him, many of them familiar to Yakov. Edvin and Zhenia are covering their emotions well, but Luda looks like she'd like to have Kalinin as a test subject for her vivisections. And Yakov is still armed. He is always armed, but now he has a gun as well.

"He has been debriefed," Aliana says. She walks forward, step by step, until her hand is on Kalinin's arm. "Making him repeat himself would be counterproductive and could induce him to think of missions as unpleasant. I am sure I can reassure you myself."

The shift in the air is palpable as they leave. Kalinin's assistants are left pointing guns at empty air as the Red Room's inner circle sweep down on Yakov. He only realizes that Aliana was lying after half an hour into his third debrief, Alek jotting down notes on all the conversations he listened to in West Berlin.

Alek notices his distraction and sends him to get coffee. In the kitchen, he's watching the coarse grounds settle in the glasses when Aliana comes in. She rinses her mouth with tapwater, several times.

"The things I do for the Motherland and comrade Stalin," she says.

When she stretches up to reach for a clean glass, there are four small bruises on the back of her neck. Yakov exercises his memory to locate the timing of her injury between the morning in Berlin and now, but comes up empty.

 

*

 

The next time they leave Moscow, they go to Cairo. Then Berlin again, then Thailand. Each time Yakov is tested by the brain scientists, his arm tested and improved by Masha, and his brain filled with new information by Aliana and Alek. He goes in alone, but each time Aliana is waiting in the safe house. Sometimes, he counts the hours-minutes-seconds until safe house ETA because he knows she will explain and reassure and quieten the ruckus in his mind.

She's the only one he tells about the ghosts he sees, sometimes. She tells him not to tell anyone else. She says she knows the war movies these images come from, and that all soldiers watched them during the war, because it was comforting to think a hero in a mask could sweep in and rescue you.

She says nightmares of Nazi scientists are normal. She teaches him ways to cope with them. Yakov chooses the number on the half-destroyed death medal she sometimes wears (taken from a dead soldier in Stalingrad) as his mnemonic to defeat the ghosts. The number, and all the names she gave him.

Yakov Ivanovich Barsky. Yasha. The Winter Soldier. 32557038.

The next mission is Paris, and Alek takes the lead on the briefing. His new lieutenant's stars are fresh enough to shine. He jokes brightly, demanding that Yakov teach him American humor, and his clowning even draws a laugh from Aliana where she's sitting in the corner. Yakov suspects the Red Room is doing well, because Aliana is less thin, and she's wearing flowing coats of soft wool instead of her unkempt unmarked uniforms. Alek's eyes still follow her. They're all careful to keep a distance from Kalinin.

Aliana doesn't come to Paris with him. Alek does, but Alek is all smiles and boot polish. Alek doesn't have nightmares. Alek doesn't smoke cigarettes in yellow-stained translucent holders.

Yakov carries out reconnaissance, test run and mission without a hitch. Then he stands at the door of the safe house, the explosion ringing through his ears again and again. In his head, the ambassador's car swells and bulges, budding out until it's a tank bigger than a house, and then someone throws (launches, he had a grenade launcher on that Paris rooftop, you'd have to be crazy to jump on a tank with a hand grenade) a grenade and it blossoms into fire.

He doesn't resist when Alek brings him inside and sits him down next to the telephone. The receiver is pressed to his ear.

Yasha, Yasha, Yasha, Aliana's voice repeats for what feels like hours, until he's breathing normally.

"I'll make sure it doesn't happen again," she says. "Even if I'm not able to be there, I'll write it all down so that everyone knows how to make you comfortable."

"Why aren't you here?" he asks. It's a breach of his promise to leave the knowing to her, but tonight is different. Tonight he needs to know to chase away the ghosts.

There's a sharp cry on her end of the crackling telephone line, cutting through the static, and the rushing of feet before someone starts crooning in the distance.

"Her name is Nadezhda," Aliana says, then switches to her rough English. "Her name is Hope."

 

*

 

After Paris, everyone pretends it was a normal mission and a normal debrief. Sometimes, Yakov wonders if only Alek and Aliana know about the way his mind went out. But that would be a betrayal of the Red Room procedures, and they are very good operatives, so the most likely explanation is that everyone pretends.

He plays ping pong with Alek in the basement. Alek stops calling him the American and starts calling him Yasha. They talk about missions and tradecraft and what happens in the office. They don't talk about Aliana and Kalinin.

Aliana talks to Yakov every night on the telephone, and comes back to the Red Room six weeks after Paris. She starts curling her hair and masking the frostbite scars with thick makeup that settles over the ravaged skin like snow over bomb craters. On her third day back, she spends two hours in General Karpov's office and comes out with all the makeup washed off.

Zhenia tells Yakov that Aliana and Kalinin got married when she decided to have the baby whose name means Hope. Yakov's mind brings up images of white dresses and rice, but these are bourgeois nonsense, he knows, and marriages are registered in a civil office. Aliana doesn't even leave for the night at the same time as her husband; she works later and later, writing manuals on how to treat Yakov and other Red Room special items, reading books on psychology and dialectics, jotting down notes. Yakov doesn't have to stay in his room if she's still in the office, so when she's translating her correspondence he sits by her with a German dictionary and looks up the medical terms she doesn't know.

Each Monday, Aliana tells him about things Nadezhda did during the weekend, and the things the caretakers at the all-week nursery told her. He forms an image of the child in his mind: tenacious, frail of health but determined to explore the world around her. In his mind, she has Aliana's eyes and wispy blonde hair and nothing of Kalinin at all.

 

*

 

The day the world ends, Yakov watches the news spread even before he knows what the news is.

General Karpov comes back from a morning meeting with a thoughtful expression. He stops for a moment by Edvin's desk, then Alek's. Edvin tosses a crumpled up ball of paper at Luda, who pockets it and heads to the bathroom. Aliana follows her a minute later, pretending she doesn't see Alek get up and head towards her. Alek ends up sitting down in her chair, watching Yakov practice his Arabic handwriting. There will be more Middle Eastern missions soon.

Across the room, Zhenia and Masha bring in a tray of tea and start distributing it on everyone's desks.

"What are you drinking to?" Yakov asks. It's safe to ask Alek.

"We are drinking to the end of the world. Maybe the beginning of the next."

"Careful, Aleksander Gavrilovich," Aliana says as she hands them both glasses. The tea is the general's special Georgian blend, mixed with Zhenia's samogon. "We are Soviet. We do not believe in the next world."

"We believe in the next world of communism we are building," Yakov says, and Alek almost chokes on a laugh.

Kalinin comes running out of his office, across the floor and outside. His men follow him, leaving the inner sanctum of the Red Room political-officer-free.

Masha's boots thud on the desk as she clambers up, glass raised. "Here's to the old bastard! Here's to Josif Vissarionovich! May God have mercy on his soul!"

Yakov raises his own glass, just like everyone else. He cannot recall ever doing anything like this, ever drinking to a dead man's name.

"Stalin!" they all call out. "Stalin!"

 

*

 

The week after Stalin's funeral, Yakov sees the bruise on Aliana's arm. It's high up, only visible because she's fastening her cuffs after washing her hands, and Masha's standing in the open bathroom door, talking to her about the way her grandmother would give teething babies a spoonful of vodka.

He doesn't remember events, but he remembers facts. One fact he remembers is that when someone like that, small and combative, is ashamed of their bruises, they don't want to talk about it but that doesn't mean you can't give comfort. Aliana cares for him, before and during and after missions, and he owes her. He owes her his name and his identity and all the use he has been to the Motherland.

He asks her to spar with him, with the excuse that he always practices with people bigger than him and needs a change. She's rusty but vicious, with a sniper's knowledge of vital points, and too easy to immobilize. He challenges her to throw him until she does.

He notices she never wears marks from her falls, or his grip, only the times he hits home with the blunt practice knives. It takes a lot of force to bruise her skin.

Alek shows up one evening to poke fun at them, and Yakov keeps score as Aliana wipes the floor with him. She laughs like a machine gun, staccato and sharp. Others drift by, placing bets, but no-one asks him to name his odds.

He thinks it's because he's too good at assessing situations. He has devised thirty-two ways to place bruises on Kalinin's skin without putting either Aliana or himself under suspicion.

Once Alek retreats from the mat, eyes shining even as he admits his defeat, Aliana looks up at Yakov. She shakes her head, only once.

 

*

 

It's a summer sunset, late and bleeding. Yakov is sitting in an upstairs window to use its light to review Alek's notes from the last mission debriefing. It saves electricity, which contributes to the prosperity of the Motherland.

Alek is packing up the detritus of his report-writing, the multitude of pencils and erasers and sharpeners. He smiles furtively as he touches something in the depths of his bag, then lookes up at Yakov.

"Guess you'd be as good as any," he says. "It's Zveda's birthday next month. Do you think she'll like it?"

It is a small bottle with a red and gold label, but when Yakov removes the stopper, the scent does not fit the peeling paint around them. He smells bitter orange and coriander, with spices and flowers. It's a scent for a woman in a long flowing dress and giant hat, getting into a limousine in front of the Waldorf-Astoria, an image that flashes vivid as memory. Nothing near a scarred and cutting ex-sniper, her growth stunted by famines, her fingernails bitten to the quick.

"She'll love it," he says.

Alek grins. "She needs something to cheer her up."

Yakov gives him a long look. Alek doesn't meet his eyes, bending over to fasten his bag.

"I'll be discreet. Kalinin won't know."

"Why does everyone fear Kalinin?" Yakov asks. "He is state security. You are state security. General Karpov is state security and outranks him."

Alek sweeps the pencil shavings into a rough circle, with hole-punch chads around them. "This is society. They are the ones who work towards communism. We are state security, around it, to guard from reactionaries and fascists and enemies of the people." He twists a handful of paperclips into a spider that crawls around the chad line. "We're good at what we do. But we also need to be doing the right thing. That's the idea of the political officer. An outside view, someone to watch us, someone to keep us on the right course. They are the eyes and ears of the leadership, and the axe if they detect rot."

"Axe?"

Alek grins. "You weren't here in 1935. I wasn't here. But people talk. What Jezhov and Beria did wasn't modern surgery. The last few years... I guess it's more tourniquet than axe. They say the people who disappear don't get shot, but put to use elsewhere. You didn't hear that from me."

Yakov nods. It's an old deal, about how he leaves the knowledge to Aliana and now Alek. Safer, not to know. Familiar. But he can't help the fact his mind works and brings up questions. "Beria. He's important now?"

"He's in the Politburo. He's in charge of the Politburo. He's the brains and the axe, now. They say Kalinin used to be his secretary."

"Kalinin isn't anyone's brains. He doesn't do much."

"He interferes more on the lower floors," Alek agrees. "He can't interfere with you. You're Zvezda's."

And Aliana's married to Kalinin, so he can't attack Yakov without attacking her. Yakov wonders if the bruises on Aliana's skin are a replacement for wounds on his.

He reaches out with his left hand and crushes the paperclip-spider like a fly.

 

*

 

He hears the name Beria whispered in the corridors of the Red Room all through the summer. The man's fall is quiet, marked only in the rising content of the whispers. Crimes. Corruption. Blackmail. Women, chosen and forced and strangled if they resisted.

People look around for Kalinin's men before whispering, but they ignore Yakov. They know he keeps his silence. They don't know he keeps his counsel, too.

In September, the phone rings while Luda and Zhenia are working him through a new pain-control technique, one that's very promising for long-term low-level discomfort, though not for when they simulate the pain of broken bones. Luda lost fingers to Stalingrad's cold as well, and when she picks up the receiver with her left hand, it swings between the three fingers that are left.

She listens, and her lips curl, baring teeth. But she does not let loose with any of her curses and threats. Instead, she only says, "Yes, Zvezda."

Luda can't drive - won't drive, and the General never makes her do it - and Zhenia has been at the liquor for hours, so she snarls at the guards downstairs until they let her and Yakov through. He knows less about Moscow than Berlin and Paris and Cairo, but there are service-issue maps in the dashboard compartment, and Luda uses a flashlight to read them by night. They're at the hospital in seventeen minutes and it's wrong. There are no guards on the door, no bright lights, no Edvin to chase out people who smoke and make the other patients cough.

This is wrong, just like Aliana walking so gingerly, the white of bandages peeking between the buttons of her blouse. She and Luda communicate in half-sentences - brat? - nursery - home? - Room - until the car doors are closed and he's driving them back to where it's clean and safe and right.

"You should report him," Luda says in the back seat. "This is illegal."

"It was illegal when Beria grabbed girls off the street and strangled them if they didn't spread their legs for him," Aliana says, the first time he hears it out loud, not whispered. "No-one cared until he tried to take over the Union."

"Zvezda..."

"We're married," she says simply. "If we divorce, he'll try to keep Nadezhda. He still has friends."

Luda grabs her hand, three fingers closing like claws around a bruised wrist. In the rear-view mirror, Aliana's eyes are fixed on Yakov's, the scars on her cheekbones like a lunar landscape. Like alpine snow, the kind that hurts when you fall.

 

*

 

There are a few rules that no-one needed to tell Yakov. He does not plan missions, without orders. He does not act of his own volition, without orders. He does not leave the Red Room compound, without orders.

He's bending the rules, working on orders that come from within, some shadowy place that tells him (in an American accent that sounds like stubborn sunshine) that no-one should put that look on a woman's face and get away with it. The other voice (Russian, smoke-rough) points out with sniper-precision that after Beria's fall, with the coming trial that everyone knows will end with execution, Kalinin is no longer useful to the Red Room, no longer their tamed minotaur.

"Kalinin's inspecting a facility in the North," Alek tells him, in the upstairs storeroom that they designate for briefings that are gossip, because Alek knows he listens to people. "The General recommended him for this trip."

"How long?"

"Three weeks." Alek smiles, as smooth as ever. "Or longer. He's flying Aeroflot."

They both know (the public doesn't) how often Aeroflot planes come down. They both hope.

Alek asks Masha to fit Yakov with the new arm, the strength enough to crush steel or bone. Yakov gets new guns to test, a lighter assault rifle that can by manufacturer's claim fire in any conditions. He checks that claim thoroughly, including urban nighttime. He tests other new nighttime equipment too, goggles, camouflage, silent grapnels, while Alek follows in the car so that they can tick the box that says "proper supervision provided".

From the roof of a crumbling townhouse, he watches a woman rock her child to sleep among the disassembled pieces of a sniper rifle. When the child stops moving, she returns to her work. Assemble. Disassemble. Clean. Repeat.

During the day, he keeps by Aliana's side, out of people's way, and tries to avoid seeing ghosts. She kicks his chair whenever he starts muttering to himself in English. Once, he kicks back, and she frowns instead of smiling. That day he delays her just long enough that Alek can get his coat as well, and the young lieutenant sweeps her off with promises of cakes and coffee. The next morning, she reacts to the kick by throwing a paper ball at Yakov's nose. Her aim and his block are both perfect.

Yakov reads his briefing materials and listens idly when others stop by her desk. She's working with Edvin now, on an evolution of his experiments in electroshocks. Apparently they can wipe someone's memory, which would be very useful for a disposable asset in a mission if not for the fact that while such people can be forced to obey orders, it's no replacement for the efficiency of dedication to a cause, or the combat experience that allows for altering mission plans on the fly. Yakov wonders if his own case is an inspiration there, since it took him two years to be able to complete a mission, and by that time he knew his own secrets to betray on an operating table.

Aliana has some ingenious ideas on how to bring back just enough of the wiped memories for efficiency, with a combination of mnemonics and familiar sights and sounds and scents. Edvin keeps telling her to get her act together and finish secondary school so that she can show up all the old fossils in the psychology department.

Yakov's at her desk when she gets a call. The office around them is dim, lit only by a handful of desk lamps, other people working late. Aliana has her shoes off, stocking feet tucked under her thighs, hiding the missing toes from view.

"Hello," she says, never names, never identifying factors.

Then she goes pale, corpse-eyed. She reaches for a notepad, scribbling a few words in a too-tight hand.

She walks to the bathroom without running, but she doesn't pause to put on her shoes.

Yakov puts his own papers in the briefcase he inherited from a short-lived assistant of Masha's. Leaning over to retrieve his pencil (stolen by Aliana and chewed in retaliation for his borrowing her stapler without permission), he lets his eyes slide over the notepad.

The Arktika, from Murmansk. Leningradsky station. 2035, in an hour and forty-five minutes.

Not Aeroflot, after all.

He catches Alek's eye across the room. "Tests," he offers, the name they have for climbing roofs and sighting weapons on people his thoughts paint with Kalinin's face.

 

*

 

In late October, Moscow is saving money, energy on half-power until the real cold hits and heat becomes a question of survival. The concrete tentacles of train platforms on the Leningradsky terminus are dimly lit landing strips to nowhere, peopled by the bleary-eyed corpses who stagger off the Arktika, their limbs unused to walking after a day and a half on the train. The cold air kills, mercifully, the smell of sweat and alcohol.

Yakov lets that wave buffet him, flowing through the cracks. He has to make a conscious effort to move like a Russian, head down, feet shuffling, his body tensed against the imbalance of his arm rather than swinging into it. Kalinin knows him too well, and Yakov doesn't want him to know.

The object of this mission is stealth. He's being a ghost in a worn-out coat and Alek's borrowed gloves. He holds a ghost of a blade in his hand.

He follows in the wake of a policeman pushing through the crowd. People will remember the uniform, not someone taking advantage of the temporarily cleared route. All along the train to the first-class carriage, where even in this egalitarian society the elite combatants for communism travel in style.

At the carriage door, someone in a greatcoat takes the envelope from the policeman's hand and opens it with an impatient, familiar tug. The flash of pale hair under a hat, turning.

Yakov looks into Kalinin's eyes and sees both anger and fear.

He's compromised, plan upturned, but he's also close enough that it takes three long strides to reach the steps. He pushes the policeman and uses the leverage to jump up. The door on the other side is hanging open, into the darkness of October night. Out, down, chasing a shadow.

He knows the layout of the platforms, but the turnouts trip him up. He tears the glove when he catches himself with the metal hand. Flash, Kalinin turning to look back.

Yakov is younger, faster, trained to perfection. His target is a paper-pusher. His target leaps over a flatbed, drops over the side, fires a shot that whizzes past Yakov's right ear.

Yakov fires back at speed. Three bullets spark off the railcar wheels. It sends Kalinin running again, scrambling across another set of tracks and into the looming shape of the switching tower that controls traffic across all of the terminus.

Height advantage. Single entrance. Communications equipment.

Yakov remembers the row of medals across the chest of Kalinin's dress uniform, marking battles across the long road to Berlin. Lenino's blood bath had been there, and Smolensk, and Grodno. Rifle division.

He uses the remaining bullets to take out the upstairs windows. The power line crawls along spindly masts that topple under his hand, and that's communications cut off.

It turns out that he moves fast enough that Kalinin wastes all his bullets before he's halfway up the stairs.

"Stop this," Kalinin barks as he retreats into the forest of signal levers. "You're acting under illegal orders. Aliana Vladimirovna isn't authorised to assign missions to the Winter Soldier programme."

Yakov shrugs. "Sorry, pal. No orders." There's something wrong about his own voice, but he can't place it. "I just don't like you."

"She's using you! She faked it all - those reports about your hallucinations, those recommendations to reset your conditioning, she's setting you up to take the fall!"

Two steps forward. Slowly. "Zvezda didn't even talk to me about it."

"Yes, Zvezda." Kalinin is stalling. His skin is glistening in the shadows thrown by distant station lights. Nervous sweat. Buying every breath with his words. "They called her that because she just sat high up and killed anyone she wanted, like a White Russian princess. Germans. Thieves. Soldiers who got first pick of a new weapons shipment. She's like that, she thinks she can pull anyone's strings, and you're the perfect puppet!"

"I don't listen to bullies." Yakov's face itches, like it wants to smile. "Just gets you all worked up. Steve listens to every bully in the world and then I gotta get him out of trouble for trying to beat their heads in."

"Russian!" Kalinin screams. "You're Russian, you fight for the Soviet Union, you're a Soviet soldier!"

He searches for words the political officer will understand. "I just don't like people picking on friends of mine."

"Friends?" Kalinin draws himself up, soldier-straight. "You're a tool. And she's a bitch. Fuck her."

"You won't," Yakov tells him. "You won't touch her again."

Kalinin sneers, and Yakov knows that if Steve sees that face it'll end in explosions, and explosions aren't good mission protocol, and Alek hates explosion paperwork, so he has to finish it before Steve gets here with the little girl who is called Hope. He's out of bullets and he dropped his knife, but he's always, always armed.

It's easier to punch through a man's chest than through the door of a car. Messier. Blood and bone fragments, and skin stretching for a moment before it tears. Red froth. Lung tissue.

Someone is screaming. Down down down. Get down, but Kalinin can't, because he fell between two signal levers that hold him up like stakes. Yakov steps away, because it's mission procedure. Get back to base. Debrief. Listen to Aliana's voice repeating his name.

Someone grabs his wrist, and he breaks their arm.

The screams follow him all the way to the Red Room. General Karpov and Aliana stand on the steps outside the building, in the old factory courtyard. They look at someone behind him, and then Alek circles him. Alek knows him, moving so slowly, smiling so calmly, not a danger, a pal to talk to and to plot with. Alek knows, Alek can explain.

Alek explains to the General in a low voice, and Aliana walks forward. She's wearing a green flannel nightgown under the greatcoat, which makes no sense if she knew her husband was coming back tonight, if she knew, if she knew.

"It's going to be all right," she says.

She opens her arms, and he hugs her for the first time, under the coat, leaving brown traces of drying blood on her gown. She smells of bitter orange and coriander, Alek's little bottle, Red Moscow printed crookedly on the label.

He feels the needle go into the back of his neck and he holds still, just for her.

 

*

 

He is waiting.

He does not remember any period of time when he was not waiting. There must have been a time before, because he is not a child, and because his mind offers the methods of usage of most of the objects in the room except for the many-buttoned electric terminal. His mind distinguishes only familiar and unfamiliar, not memories. (Not memories that go for more than two days five hours thirty-seven minutes and two dead bodies.)

He hears voices in the corridor. Two are familiar: the man with the needles and the man who had been so angry that Stalin was an unfamiliar name. They are arguing with a third person who keeps silent. The asset is not ready. The asset is unresponsive. The asset is dangerous, murderous, lethal. The asset's mind is gone.

The asset tunes them out, concentrating his attention on reading the news clippings in the glass case to the right of the door. The harvest in the Donetsk region has broken records this year and Comrade Khrushchov sent his congratulations.

The door opens. He keeps his eyes on the list of crops.

"Good morning," the woman says.

He moves his eyes slowly. When he moves fast, when he moves like his body screams at him to move, people are afraid or hurt or dead.

She's in uniform, without insignia, with grey-brown hair cropped short and curled. The second thing he notes is that she's in her late twenties, but she looks younger because of her height. The first is the discoloration along her cheekbones. Frostbite, his mind prompts.

"What is your name?" She sits on the other bed, the one that's not equipped with restraints. Her boots aren't uniform, not with that clumsy stitching.

"I don't know."

She cocks her head. She'd be pretty if not for the frostbite, with a small nose and large, half-moon eyes.

"Would you like one?"

He keeps from frowning. Expressions of dissatisfaction provoke fear (theirs) and pain (his). He reads her name instead from the plaque over her chest pocket.

"You are Yakov Ivanovich Barsky," she says. "You are a hero of the War for the Motherland. You were severely injured and frozen. General Karpov's team retrieved you and the scientists have been able to recover the functions of your body, but your mind was severely injured. This is why you have no memory. We have a method of helping your mind, but it's temporary. The first time I offered this choice to you, you chose to fight for the Motherland again. You have been revived four times now, only when there is a task that you alone have the power to complete."

He remembers a man with star insignia and no fear in his eyes. Karpov.

"The aggression is normal," she says. "Your last experience was of war and death. Your body wants you to defend itself. You'll need to learn all over again who the real enemies are, and who are your friends."

She leans over, and he forces himself not to flinch. She smells of cigarettes and bitter, heavy perfume. She unlocks the cuffs around his wrists, and there's no fear in her eyes.

"My name is Aliana Vladimirovna," she says. "I'm the White Star. I'm your friend."


	3. RESTART

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is a routine when he wakes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks to Taelle, for a name.

There is a routine when he wakes.

Each time it's new to him to start with, but the feeling of familiarity rises with every prompt. He remembers the explanations of how scars from his initial injury and cryogenic sleep make his mind and memories unstable, and how the long-term memory access mechanism is affected. The memories are not gone, of course, but if he forces himself to remember, it hastens the process of fragmentation and necessitates another wiping, another careful restart of the cranky machine that is his brain. The triggers help him recall the most important skills and ideas, the facets of his personality, until he feels like a human being again.

The first trigger is his name. The second is hers.

Yakov isn't not sure what the others are, though the routine of his first meeting with Aliana is familiar. She asks him to remember General Karpov, who at this point is at best a glimpse at the end of a room. She asks him to recall whether the summer of 1952 was hot or cold, and what it smelled like. They talk for hours as he wakes up, his mind so much slower than the instincts that make him defend himself.

His first true test is walking behind Aliana to her office, passing other people in the corridor without lashing out when they stare at him. The office is always warm, the paint on the walls yellowed with cigarette smoke. She asks someone - unfamiliar, new, very young - to make the thick, bitter coffee, and when they have coffee she spreads the photos over the desk, telling him all he has slept through in the small world before they start on events in the new.

The eldest, the blonde, is called Nadia, which is short for Nadezhda. Her younger sister has dark hair and bold eyes, and her name is Alya-Aleksandra. He hears about the way Alya uses dialectics to argue for her right to postpone napping in kindergarten, and how Nadia got the leading part in the school ceremony to honor heroes of the Soviet Union, how she looked like an angel in her little Red Army uniform. Nadia is studying ballet, but Aliana thinks she'll drop it soon. She does not love it, and you have to love it to keep doing something so very difficult. Aliana will talk about it to her husband soon.

Yakov meets her husband a few hours later, after refresher weapons training that includes whatever new inventions appeared while he slept. Aleksander Gavrilovich Lukin is polite with Yakov and pulls out Aliana's chair for her to sit down, and Yakov spares a moment to think they're well-matched before they start talking about who he is to kill.

*

He is awake and his name is Yakov Ivanovich Barsky and he chooses to fight for the Motherland again.

He knows the first few days are important and difficult, and he does his best to listen to everything Aliana tells him. She's his friend. Even if she didn't tell him that, he could guess by the warmth of her voice and the way she smiles when he dredges up the inside jokes they share, like the way he innocently murmurs "Yes, Zvezda".

Yakov stirs his tea and looks around the room. "We usually drink coffee, no?"

Aliana smiles proudly. "Yes, we do. I can't wait to drink coffee again, but my new lodger doesn't like it. Alya was the same, though I couldn't get enough of the stuff with Nadia."

Yakov frowns, and it's only when she taps her swollen stomach that he understands. She's pregnant, heavily, and Nadia and Alya will have a sister or a brother.

He wonders if knowing she smokes when not pregnant is memory or deduction from the nicotine residue on the walls and shelves.

"Did I see you pregnant before?" he asks.

"With Nadia," she confirms. "The first time you ran a mission without me was because I was in hospital giving birth. You called me the moment you were back in the safe house, to ask me about the name."

He can almost hear the baby's cry in the background, fancy or memory. "I missed Alya?"

"You were asleep." Aliana crosses her arms over her stomach. "That wasn't really a good time. I lost a good friend. Masha, the woman who completed the first versions of your arm. You liked her, she never let anyone get away with nonsense."

"Masha," he repeats. "What happened?"

"She walked off the roof, two weeks after I gave birth. We hadn't really talked in a month or two."

He pushes her tea glass closer to her, and she takes it up with a small smile. Warm is good, he remembers. People who are sad should drink warm drinks.

She winces as she sets the glass down, then gets up to rub the small of her back. "I don't know if it's a boy or a girl, but I know it'll be a champion Cossack dancer. It's currently practicing on my liver."

He watches the way her stomach shifts under her dress as she stretches. "How does it feel?"

For a moment, she looks at him with unguarded puzzlement. Then she crosses the room, locks the door and comes back to his side.

He's still sitting down, so he has to raise his hand to the level of his eyes to touch her belly. The skin is very warm even though the dress, and taut. Then something ripples, like a fish moving through the swamp, and he raises his other hand just in time for the sensors to register the strike from inside. Aliana shivers, head to toe, and he murmurs an apology. His metal hand is cold.

She runs her fingers through his hair, which is long in the way she says is fashionable now. He shifts closer, until his ear is pressed to her belly and he can feel every movement, almost hear it along with her heartbeat.

"I think it's a girl," she whispers. "I think I'll call her Masha."

*

He's awake, and the world as usual is complicated.

Aliana tells him about it quietly, during a walk along the river that is ostensibly to test his observation skills. General Karpov has enemies, of course. He has been a Major General for almost twenty years and it does not look like he'll ever get another star. But now that Andropov has Brezhnev and Suslov's ear, there are people who have their eye on the tidy and very effective kingdom that is the Red Room. Yakov's mission in China should be routine, almost humanitarian, but she wants him to be careful. She wants him not to trust people. Alek is stuck doing inspections in Siberia and she worries.

Then she laughs and says she needs a break to get away from it all, soon. Later, she leaves Yakov in her office going over the paperwork while she talks to the General, and he finds a little map of Sochi tucked under the typewriter she uses with four fingers only. When she comes back, he asks about the proofs next to it, and she beams as she explains that she's now a Candidate of the Sciences and her thesis on creating and strengthening ideological conviction will be published in a bulletin that everyone in the KGB reads. He calls her Doctor, in English, and asks what poor creatures were her experimental subjects.

*

The mission goes smoothly. The return doesn't.

There are men waiting for him at the airport, in the labyrinth between passport control and customs. This is not protocol: he always makes his own way to the Red Room, a ghost to everyone who cannot pass those half-rusted doors. The men don't have the words that mean danger, the triggers that mean obey, or even the pills he gets to shed the haze of long-distance travel.

He still follows the three of them to the car. They don't expect him to speak, and they say little between themselves. The youngest of them throws his suitcase into the trunk. As Yakov bends down to wedge it tight so the guns don't rattle, his left hand leans against the tire and pinches the valve just enough to tear the base.

The flat tire gets noticeable when they're past Khimki, at the edge of the forest. The men in front get out first, then order Yakov out as well when they see the tire has to be changed. The youngest one keeps a gun on him as the other two take out the tools and the spare.

The youngest one dies first, because he's the one least likely to know anything. Yakov uses his own gun to crush his throat. He kicks the jack away from the car, and the man with graying hair is too busy with shock over his crushed hand to move before Yakov breaks the third man's neck.

Yakov takes the man with the crushed hand deep into the birch forest. By the time he's done, he knows more than before. Taking him was supposed to be the first move in encircling the Red Room before crushing it. The final timetable is forty-eight hours, but since - apparently - he's prone to going missing for longer, when his scars interfere with his brain, they didn't think his disappearance would lead to general alarm.

The Red Room is being watched, and listened to. He does not have General Karpov's home address, and whoever is behind it (he didn't get names, only ranks and codes) will know he's on the loose within two hours, by the time he was supposed to be secured in a dacha on the other side of Moscow. Major Lukin, Aliana's Alek, is in Siberia.

He walks all the way back to the airport. When he comes across a stream, he washes the brain tissue and gunpowder residue off his hands.

*

The plane is no problem. The hotel, Yakov finds on the first try. The Rossiya's security is good, but not up to even American hotel standards, and Aliana booked the rooms under her own name. The single will be hers (with a note that she's switching to a double in a week's time - Alek, he thinks), and the double shared by the girls. Alya and Masha are eight and four, small enough to share a bed.

He knows something is wrong when he closes his hands around the mouth and arms of the woman on the bed. Too little flesh, too long limbs, hair flowing long instead of short and permed.

In the moonlight coming in through the open window, he sees a face he knows only from photographs. Terror in the pale blue eyes.

"Please be quiet," he whispers, trying his best for kindness. "I'm a friend of Aliana Vladimirovna's."

The girl shakes. Her whimper is trapped in his palm.

"I know you." Tentatively, he lets go of her arms to touch her hair. "You're Nadia. You're fifteen years and three months old. You used to practice ballet until you were twelve, you bake excellent cakes, and you are going out with a boy called Boris. Your mother talks a lot about you. Please don't scream when I let go."

She nods stiffly. She doesn't scream.

Yakov sits back on his heels. "I thought this was Aliana Vladimirovna's room. I need to talk to her."

Nadia coughs, flinches. "Masha had a nightmare. We switched."

"I need to talk to her," he repeats. "Can you please walk to her room and ask her to come here?"

Nadia sits up. She does up the top button of her cotton nightgown, then curls up on herself, lips flaring. "Are you sleeping with her?"

He frowns. "No. Can you please ask her to come here? Tell her it's Yakov Ivanovich. Yasha."

She jumps to her feet on the mattress. There's a dancer's grace left to her movements as she descends to the floor. At the door, she turns around.

"I hate her," she says.

Nadia is fifteen, he remembers.

*

Aliana is wrapped in a pink bathrobe with white stripes over a blue nightgown. She's smoking cigarettes in a lucite tube. She has two of the holders, so she can prepare the next cigarette while she finishes smoking the previous one. She does it by feel, with the window shut and the lights turned off.

"How did you find me?" she asks when he's done with his report.

"You had a map of Sochi in your office. This is the best hotel in Sochi. I checked the register."

"Good." She rubs her forehead, leaving a smear of ash to match the scars on her cheeks. "Good tradecraft. You weren't followed?"

Yakov shakes his head. This is the third time she's asked him this question.

She paces the room, limping a little. Her feet are bare, and he sees three of the toes on her left foot are short stumps. He wonders how cold it was in Stalingrad.

"The General's phones will be tapped," she says. "They'll be watching everything we have in Moscow. But we have people in places they have no idea about."

Yakov sits on Nadia's bed. This is familiar, listening to Aliana as she thinks.

"Alek. I don't know all of them, but Alek does. I know how to get to him. There's a house outside town."

"Transport?" he asks. It's obvious she'll need his help, with three children. Two children and a girl who hates her.

A sharp sound escapes her throat. "They'll know who I am. That fucking dissertation, I signed it with my married name. They know I'm Alek's wife and they'll be watching this hotel."

"Roof," he says. "Can you climb?"

She bares her teeth, and he remembers that in Stalingrad, she was younger than Nadia is now. She looks it now, sharp angles and shadows. "I can climb anything. But if I go, they'll..."

He nods. "I'll stay. I'll look after the girls."

She tries to push another cigarette into a holder, but both cigarette and tube roll away from her fingers. She swears, then finally looks at him. She meets his eyes for the first time since she walked into this room.

"They're children," she says. "Even Nadia. She only saw a gun for the first time this year, in school. She's never gone hungry. I don't understand her."

"They're Nadia and Alya and Masha," he says. "I'll look after them."

Aliana's eyes are very wide in the dark.

He opens his suitcase. He keeps the rifles, and the Kalash, but he hands her two of the pistols. She puts them aside as she dresses in Nadia's clothes, picking the darkest blouse and trousers. She trails a hand through the cigarette ash on the window sill, then smears it on her face and arms. The guns disappear into places invisible even to him.

She opens the window, letting in the moonlight.

"Take care of them." Her voice is soft.

He's driven to his feet by one of those impulses he's learned not to examine too closely, in case they're symptoms of deterioration. He wraps his arms around her. She's not warm or soft at all. Her heart is beating as fast as a terrified bird's.

She catches hold of his metal arm with both hands. She presses her cheek to the red star.

"To the end," he says.

Aliana's head jerks up, but she doesn't say anything. Instead, she pushes away from him and into the moonlight.

*

Nadia is curled up in the only chair in the double room. There's a lamp turned on next to one of the beds, and a tousled head peering suspiciously at him, so he sits on the other bed. He tucks the suitcase under it. He knows better than to scare the kids even more.

The tangled duvet stirs and crawls towards him. In person, Masha is chubby-cheeked and smells of cake.

"Who're you?" she asks between two yawns.

He lifts his arm very slowly. She's much faster at crawling under it.

"My name is Yakov Ivanovich Barsky. I work with your mother. There's an emergency at work, so she asked me to look after you while she takes care of it."

"'mergency?"

"Something important," Alya says. Her bangs are standing up almost vertically. "Is it Dad?"

Nadia lifts her head.

"No. Aleksander Gavrilovich is all right." Yakov wonders if that is true, but Major Lukin is very competent, so the chances are high. "But you may have to come back to Moscow."

Alya pouts. "Can't you stay here with us? I want to go to the beach!"

"Beach," Masha agrees. She's braced on his thigh and doing her best attempt at pouting.

"You'd be better at it than Mom," Alya offers. "You look scary enough to get rid of the boys who follow Nadia."

The teenager makes a wordless sound of supreme offense.

Masha pulls herself up on his arm, then pokes at it suspiciously. "Why's your arm so cold?"

"Because it's metal," he tells her. "Look, I have a red star to show I'm Soviet."

"You look like a tree ornament," she tells him. "Why's your arm metal?"

"Because I lost the arm I had before."

"Why?"

"In the war." He tousles her hair. "I lost it protecting little girls like you from the bad Nazi soldiers."

"You're not old enough," Nadia says. "Not for Nazis."

"I'm older than I look," he tells her. "Older than your parents." He's fairly sure of that, at least. Aliana told him he was a soldier in the war, which means at least eighteen, while she was seventeen when it ended. His passport says thirty now, but sometimes he feels much older. Sometimes he wonders just how long he's slept in the cold.

"You're like that tin soldier," Alya says. "The one from the fairytale. The princess found pieces of a soldier and put him together again and she took out one of her eyes to put it in his head so that he would always do exactly what she told him to, and she never told him she was the one who pushed him off the mountain and made him fall to pieces."

He wraps his metal fingers in Masha's hair. "Where did you read this story?"

"Mom told it to me." Alya shifts on her bed. "She tells the best stories."

"You mean she lies," Nadia says.

Yakov looks up at her. "Sometimes we all have to lie."

Alya crawls across her bed and over to the one he's sitting on. She curls up on his right side.

"Can you tell stories?" she asks. "Stories make everything better."

Nadia leans forward. He realizes that all three of them are children left alone with a stranger, their mother gone in the middle of the night. All three of them need comfort.

He has no stories of his own. There is the recent mission, but even though he spilled no blood until that birch forest, scaring Chinese officials is no comfort. All his other stories were told or triggered by Aliana, circling back to the frostbite scars under her eyes in the moonlight. She didn't train him for this mission.

He thinks of books, and then he's sitting on a different bed, in sunlight, a book in his hands. He can see every letter, every word. Getting it into Russian is the hard part.

"It started with a troll," he tells them. "He was a very evil troll, and one day he made a mirror that reflected everything good smaller, meaner, uglier, while evil things were reflected large and magnificent."

He suspects the girls know the Snow Queen's story, but they listen carefully to the way he tells it. When he gets to the part where the girl's faith and goodness breaks the spell on her childhood friend, Masha giggles through her yawns.

"Did they dance, later?" Alya demands, though her eyes are closing as well. "They always dance in the stories."

"I think they did," Yakov decides. "They did, though Gerda was small and she always insisted she had two left feet, so Kai probably had to drag her out to dance."

"It sounds fun," the girl murmurs, curling up next to her sister, halfway in his lap. "Dancing with a friend. Will you dance with me? When I'm bigger?"

He murmurs something that, in his mind, sounds like Yes, Zvezda.

*

Yakov stays awake through the night. It's not easy, without his medication, but it's no more difficult than any mission. The girls wake at dawn and Nadia bundles her sisters off to the bathroom. She emerges ten minutes later and shuts the door on sounds of vigorous splashing.

She sits down on the bed next to him, her arms and legs in coltish disarray. "Will she be back today?"

"I don't know," he says truthfully. "From what I know, there are about thirty-six hours left to act, but quick resolution is better."

"I really hate her," she says. "Will she be all right?"

He wraps an arm around her shoulder. The bones under his hand feel familiar.

"Everything's business with her," Nadia whispers. "Everything's part of a plan. Each time I talk to a boy, she asks about his family and prospects and how I can use it to go higher, get better, get more money. I just want someone to like me because of me."

"I like you because of you," he tells her, because it's something she needs to hear, because Aliana told him truths are better tools than lies. "I liked you since the day you were born."

That one might be a lie, but he remembers a sharp cry down a telephone line.

She turns in his hold and presses a kiss to his cheek. She's crying. In the bathroom, the water is still running.

*

The knock on the door startles him while he's brushing Masha's hair. He sends the girl running to Nadia and reaches for his suitcase.

"It's just me, American," a man says outside. His voice is heavy and hoarse. Prolonged alcohol use. "It's Yevgeniy."

Yakov keeps silent.

"Yeah, she did say - listen, Zvezda says you can trust me, but don't trust anything I give you to drink unless I drink it first."

The lock in his mind slips with a click. "Zhenia," he says and opens the door.

The man doesn't fit the image in Yakov's mind by a dozen years of heavy drinking, but it turns out the girls know him too. Aliana and Alek have him to dinner several times a year. Alya tuts and says he'd better not give their mother any more of his strange drinks.

"She did say not to trust them," Yakov says.

They get out by the delivery entrance. Nadia puts on a maid's apron and kerchief, and Yakov carries Masha on his hip. He insists on driving; he can't tell if Zhenia's smell is because of recent drinking or just embedded in his skin.

An hour gets them to a cottage on a hill. There are four black Volgas in the garden, and two familiar figures.

Alya and Masha rush at their father. Alek lifts each girl up in turn, whirling them around until they squeal. Yakov realizes they both have his nose and and jaw, and they all laugh the same way.

Nadia gets out of the car, too. Her first steps are hesitant, but then she's running and crying and falling into Aliana's arms. She has half a head's height on her mother, but she's clinging like she's going to fall without her support.

Zhenia goes into the house. Yakov stays by the car, idly scanning the perimeter.

Alek takes the girls inside. Aliana walks up to Yakov. Her face is drawn, every trace of age visible, but her eyes are smiling.

"Thank you for taking care of them," she says, and he can't remember any time before he heard those words from her lips, but that doesn't mean anything at all.

"Anything for you, pal," he says, and he meant to say Zvezda, and she flinches before smiling.

"You've been active for too long. Come inside. Sleep. It's almost over, and by the time we get to Moscow the General will have the technicians prepared to receive you and take care of you. He had to call in favors to deal with this, and you'll help him get new ones."

He follows Aliana. He always does.


	4. RELAPSE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Monsters and catastrophes

Yakov comes back from Israel into the heat of a Moscow summer and silence in the Red Room. The only sounds come from staticky radios. He passes through the corridors among people who should see him, but they are clustered around receivers.

He finds Aliana and Alek upstairs, in the gallery between their offices. Aliana's perched on the railing above the main hall. Alek is leaning against the wall. Yakov's memory offers, unprompted, that it's rare to have them in the same room without Alek looking at Aliana.

Instead, Alek looks at him. "Right. Debrief."

Yakov stands at ease, arms folded. He's heard, of course. In the airport. From the pilots. One of them knew Dobrovolsky, the commander of the Soyuz 11. Heroes of the Soviet Union, of course, everyone said that. Dead heroes, their capsule leeched of air on reentry after a month spent safely in space.

"Does it hurt?" Aliana asks. She has her arms around her knees, and in the shadows she looks three decades younger than her forty-three years. "Is it like falling asleep?"

"I don't remember," Yakov says truthfully. "I never needed to remember."

"We don't know what happened," Alek says.

"Fuck that." Aliana jumps down. "It's cheap technology, clumsy factory workers, people who were too busy saluting to get their act together. That's how dreams die in the Soviet Union. With the hiss of air going out."

Yakov looks down at his own fingers. Flesh and metal. There's a crick in his neck, muscles taut where he compensates for the weight of the arm.

"Makes me want a drink," Aliana says.

Alek finally looks at her. "Everything makes you want a drink."

She takes a step closer, into the light coming in from his office. Her skin's tinged with gray, eyes lined with shadows that bleed into the scars.

"Fuck that," she says. "You're leaving."

She's crying, and Yakov averts his eyes.

*

He debriefs with Alek - Colonel Lukin, and his mind needs to stop prompting him with too-young faces and too-young names - long into the night. In the end, he's repeating details that don't matter to anyone. The color of bricks on a particular street. The songs he kept hearing when he passed cafes. The way the Muslim girls wore their scarves, the fashion in wigs among the orthodox Jewesses.

"They tried to wipe them out," Alek says. "I never understood that. How can you class whole nations as unfit to live. Madness."

Yakov watches the pen that's sketching a tangle of tentacles.

"Some people cooperated with them. Some of the French, the Swedish. The Arabs, after the war. I never understood that either. Closing your eyes and hoping you're not next in the queue to the gas chamber."

"Your family died in the war," Yakov recalls. It's in the files, the ones he's not supposed to read, but in the absence of reliable memory he needs a basic background on the people he works with.

"Russia's family died in the war." Alek lifts his pen from the paper, then taps Yakov's arm with it. "Stealing from the enemy is right. Working with the enemy is not."

Yakov frowns. "A traitor to the Motherland?"

"The Motherland's a traitor to the Motherland." Alek smiles, fleeting. "It's more complicated than that. But I prefer work that protects the Motherland directly. General Karpov... disagreed."

"The Red Room. You are leaving the Red Room."

Alek looks up, and Yakov realizes his voice gave him away.

"Take care of her," Alek says. "Take care of Zvezda."

Yakov considers it. "I'll forget."

Alek taps the paper with the pen. He begins drawing five-point stars, like the one on Yakov's arms. "You won't forget if you look carefully. Look at the stars."

Yakov repeats after him, the sound and images drowning out the thoughts that the dead cosmonauts were looking at the stars as well.

*

There is a painting on the wall where a building should be but is missing. The abstract shapes in primary colors are close to letters.

The toe of his boot hits a can. It rolls unevenly along the cracked slabs. There is a ring on it, not a church key and it's wrong wrong wrong.

Maybe around the corner, Steve says, and he's got that crooked smile that means he's not believing it but he's saying it to make Yasha feel better. Except that's what Steve would say, but Steve's not here and he needs to find him, because he came back just like he promised.

He finds more wrong things, wrong people and wrong buildings and even the street signs. Steve's smaller, so sometimes he disappears in the crowds, finding quicker routes that mean he's waving from far ahead, waiting for Yasha to keep up. Up, up and up.

The view's not any more right from the rooftop. There are cans here, too, and the paintings that he can't recall the word for. The clouds over the city reflect the street lights and he can't see the stars.

The stars are important. There are stars in the flag, except he can't recall the number and wrong wrong wrong. There are shields on the doors of the blue cars he avoids, but the shields don't have stars on them. They should. Stars, and the scent of bitter orange and coriander.

What a dame, Steve says, Steve would say, and Yasha tells him the girls are even better. Maybe that's what they're here for, maybe they're all meeting at the Astoria for tea and Steve and Carter and Zvezda will poke fun at bourgeois chic until Bucky can just lean back and smile and be safe with all his people safe.

Except Steve said come back to Brooklyn, and the Astoria is on Park Avenue, so it has to be the Bossart, the Brooklyn Astoria, and he knows where it is and they didn't even move it so it's right even if it's dirty and there are boards across the windows of the Grosvenor Apartments on the other side of the street. He walks in, and he's sure that Steve will be there any moment, poking fun at this new style of cheap furniture and sketching all the people in their mismatched clothes, he'll ask Carter and Zvezda to pose for him, Victory and the Motherland, and Bucky.

Eventually, he finds a room in which to wait.

*

Blood on concrete, in dim light, is almost black.

The pool of blood shimmers. Someone is approaching, heavy boots all but kicking the ground. The sharp sound of heavy fabric flying through the air. Shinel, a Red Army greatcoat, gray wool and no rank insignia, and they are in America, this is not stealthy, this is not tradecraft, and this is not what should echo in the empty chamber that is his mind.

A part of him must still exist, because it admires the litany of profanities ranging from literary to scientific to the worst gutters of Moscow. In his mind, the sky is full of stars.

"I should have you all shot," the woman says. "Thirty men mobilized to find one soldier, and this is the state you put him in. What did you think to accomplish?"

The man next to her is wearing cheap shoes that pretend to be leather. He's very careful to avoid the blood on the floor.

"He was disobedient," he offers. "And he doesn't remember why."

"You think beating him up will make him obedient? Or improve his memory?"

The man shrugs. "It works on dogs."

The breath she takes is quiet, resigned. "It does not work on dogs, you imperialistic imbecile. Get out of my sight."

When the door closes, the first word she says is "Yasha". She keeps repeating it while she turns him over to his back and runs her hands over his body. Her hands are soft. The anger is gone from her face, and it fits. She doesn't hurt him. She's the first person he can remember who does not hurt him.

"Talk to me," she says. "Say anything. Tell me what you're thinking about."

"Stars." He's not sure he has the right language, but she must understand, because she smiles.

"Tell me about the stars."

"I look at the stars. When I'm falling. The stars are good. Falling is bad."

"What is my name?"

"Star." He tries again. "Zvezda."

She pulls his head into her lap. Under the coat she's wearing brown and green, ruffles, plastic imitation of silk.

"Your coat is wrong," he tells her. "Russian. Wrong tradecraft."

She smooths his hair. "I was hoping you'd notice. Can you move your left arm for me? Hold up your fingers?"

There is the whine of metal on metal, and something that isn't pain.

"Now put it down again. Good. Tell me your name again, your name and the number I taught you."

"Yakov Ivanovich Barsky." That part comes easy, a compartment in his mind sliding open. Then his mind stalls and echoes. "Three?"

Her fingers rub small circles into his scalp. She's quiet and patient. He remembers a picture he saw once, a nightmare perched on the headboard of a bed, waiting to smother the sleeper.

"Two," he manages.

Surgical steel and small round glasses and light, and a voice he hates.

"Five."

A man draped across levers in a darkened building. There's a hole in his chest, blood bubbling.

"Five."

Artillery turning into bursts of white light that tear people apart.

"Se-"

"Enough," the woman says. "Enough, Yasha. Come back to me. You don't want to go back there, do you?"

He emits a wordless whine of denial.

"Stay with me, and you won't be back. Stay with me, and never tell anyone what you saw here. What you saw in America. When you get up, leave the memory behind you on the floor."

"Get up," he echoes.

"Later." She rubs the muscles of his shoulders, easing the pain of the wrenched joint. "Before you leave it, tell me about it. Don't push yourself if you don't remember. Just tell me what was there, in Dallas, after you disposed of the senator."

He opens his mouth several times before the words come. She says not to push, so he leaves them in the English they appear in.

"Mission. Mission accomplished. In his house. Memories."

"What memories?" Her English is accented, but understandable.

"Cards. Silly cards. Steve hated. I - swell. They were swell."

"Memories," she agrees. "I saw these cards. I came as soon as I knew. I worried."

It takes him a long time, but he manages to reach up and touch her arm. She shifts to lean against the wall.

"No train to Brooklyn," he said. "All trains go to Chicago."

"Brooklyn," she prompts.

"Empty. Promised. Promised to come back."

She runs her fingers through his hair. "These are ghosts in your head. Celluloid ghosts, Yasha. They trapped you in a maze of trains and buildings, in America where no-one cares about anything other than money. Some of them are working with us, against their own country, for money they can only spend in their own country. Isn't that madness?"

He repeats the words that echo in his head. "Working with the enemy is wrong."

"Unless you come out ahead and they lose." She presses lightly on his eyes, until he sees stars again. "Did you talk to people?"

"No. Just looking."

"Good. Good tradecraft, Yasha. Now I need you to get up. Get up, walk after me, and kill the men who hurt you. They're too stupid to be left alive."

There is only one thing he can, is able to, wants to say.

"Yes, Zvezda."

*

The meeting is arranged in front of the city hall. It's dark, but there are hundreds of people around, milling around the skating rink. Yakov is used to playing a ghost - the memories are indistinct but persistent - and he subjects Aliana to a critical examination before they leave the safehouse. The fur-trimmed coat is Parisian. She complains about the felt hat being too cold, but he knows it's only for his benefit, to help him fit into the caretaker role she picked for his cover.

She wears large tinted glasses to cover her scars. He wears gloves and offers her his arm to steady her steps. The park paths are patchily covered in black ice.

He sees their contact all the way across the plaza. The man is painfully American, slim and blond with his face fixed into a permanent smile. There's something about the cheekbones and eyes that's familiar, but the jaw and the smile aren't.

The man retrieves his cigarettes and starts looking for a lighter at the right distance from them, but the movements are too careful, too rehearsed. Someone in the business, but not a professional. Yakov can't see any weapons, which means he's very confident as well.

The man takes two more steps and looks up. His eyes swivel almost naturally before landing on Yakov. "Excuse me, have you got a light?"

Aliana touches a pocket of her coat. "I might, if you ask nicely."

"A lady in red, why am I not surprised."

Their German is similar, unpolished and much more Berlin than Vienna. Yakov wonders if all spies speak the same way, or if others are taught languages as well as he learned English.

The man holds out his hand. "I'm Joe Turner."

Aliana is wearing red leather gloves. Watching the man's face, Yakov knows she's gripping hard.

"Your name," she says, "is Alexander Goodwin Pierce. You are thirty-six years old. You've been with the State Department since you graduated Yale, and for half that time you've been seconded to SHIELD. You have a sixteen-year-old daughter and two ex-wives. And you will not argue with me."

The only visible effect is a slow blink. "What do I call you?"

"Zvezda," she says.

That draws a flinch, and Pierce's blue eyes dart from her to Yakov, then back. "That was the name we got for the New York thing. The retrieval. In the last report we got from that unit."

"They were a liability," Aliana says. "They were idiots."

Yakov reacts to the change in her balance and they pivot away from the rink's barrier. She still leans heavily on him, which leaves them walking slow enough that Pierce has no trouble catching up.

"I'm authorized to discuss that incident," Pierce says. "And the follow-up. The ban on using that asset on US soil."

"Discuss?" she asks.

He smiles, walking on her other side. "I'm a great believer in discussion. Our organizations have done great things together in the last seven years. And even before - you are aware that the asset in question was designed by one of ours."

"The prototype. Which was then lost." She shrugs one shoulder. "It was crude. I heard he's dead, the designer."

Pierce's eyes twitch sideways, almost invisible in the darkness of the park. Aliana is looking straight ahead. Yakov isn't, and he commits it to memory, to tell her later.

"He was old. He was one of the people who preserved our ideas. Now it's time for a new phase."

"A new head," Aliana says. "Still trapped in a madman's mythology."

"We're trying to work out a new mythology, too." His grin is wide. "Doesn't your people's existence prove it? That men can't be trusted to be equal, because the moment you look away there's the infighting, corruption and hoarding. They need a keeper. They need someone to set the rules. That's what you do, that's what we want to do for the rest of the world, to make it safer, make it better. That's why we work together."

Aliana turns her head to look at Yakov. Her smile tells him she's considering reaching for one of the four blades hidden in the lining of her coat.

"There will be no more use of the asset on US soil," she says. "For the operative's personal reasons."

Pierce's smile falls. "Bullshit. This is the future of the world, you can't have personal reasons. Next you'll be asking your gun if it feels like firing."

"I don't serve a gun. I serve people. You talk of keepers, but you mean power. You want to rule the world."

"Doesn't everyone?" He shrugs. "You people have your fingers in half the conflicts on the globe. Tell me that isn't about power."

"It's about building a better world."

He smiles. "See, that's exactly what I-"

"A better world for the people," she says. "A just world. A fair world. A world where control isn't necessary. A world where people decide the right things by themselves. Not a prison. If we need to get our hands dirty to do so, so be it, but the goal is to have clean hands."

Pierce smiles with relief. "We want them clean, too. I think we're talking about the same things, just in different words. Listen, I don't want to argue. I want to make sure we keep working together. No more New Yorks. I was there, whatever did that wasn't human."

Aliana laughs. She leans into Yakov, and he puts an arm around her.

"It's always humans," she says. "It's always a person who pulls the trigger."

"Well, sometimes the gun explodes." Pierce looks puzzled, but keeps smiling. "Is that the reason? Did you have to terminate the asset after that? That'd be easier to sell back home."

"Did it scare you?" Aliana asks. "New York?"

"It made me happy I'm usually behind a desk," he quips. "Or meeting pretty ladies in parks."

She smiles. "Yasha. Break his fingers."

Yakov makes it left hand only. Less noticeable, just as painful. He keeps his human hand over Pierce's mouth until the scream dies, and catches Aliana's approving nod.

"The man holding you is the Winter Soldier," she tells Pierce as he takes short, gasping breaths. "If I ask him to, he will break every bone in his body, then remove pieces of each organ, one by one, leaving just enough to keep you alive and conscious of pain."

She runs her fingers over Pierce's jaw, tugging the corners of his lips back into a smile.

"He won't do it because I'm in charge of him, though I am. He won't do it because he's my friend, though he is. He will do it because we believe in the same things. That's the trouble with your organization. You preserved a madman's beliefs for four decades of scraping and slithering inside your precious SHIELD, and now that Zola's dead you're left with a handful of egomaniacs and psychopaths. They're not known for thinking big enough."

"We have power," Pierce forces out. He's got his muscles tense, but he's not actively fighting against Yakov's grip.

"I have him," she says. "That's the general's message. That if you think yourselves in power, if you threaten us, if you betray us, you will find that there is no way to live your life entirely away from shadows. And one day one of those shadows will be him. Do you think we plan his missions for him? Point him and fire? I think bigger. You should, too."

When Yakov lets him go, Pierce looks up at him. There is fear in his eyes, and something of the look of a boy in a toystore, wonder and covetousness.

"You slipped on a patch of ice," Aliana says. "An unfortunate fall."

They leave him there, in the dark. Yakov buys Aliana gluhwein near the rink and watches color come back to her face with the alcohol and spices.

"I used to shoot people like him," she says. "Those were simpler days."

*

The bus he takes from the city center is full of veterans in uniform, jangling with medals. They are coming home after the victory parade, and the vodka is flowing free. He puts his lips to the bottles they hand him, and he listens to the stories. He wonders if he'd have stories of his own, from the war. It's that kind of day.  
A victory day.

The May sun is still lighting up the streets, but in the Red Room the lights are artificial. Every radio is tuned to the same station, a triumphant mix of marches and songs. He knows very few people in the crowd, apart from the General, but the good mood means he gets a lot of help finding Aliana, upstairs.

She's perched above the upper gallery, on strange fittings covered with peeling paint that might once have held floodlights. She's holding a cigarette that's burnt down almost to the edge of the holder, and she's got her head tipped back to the ceiling.

When he climbs next to her, he sees she's been crying.

"Good mission?" she asks hoarsely.

"Good mission," he agrees. Tentatively, he reaches over to rub her shoulder. It feels like a memory.

"Brooding," she says. "Twenty years."

"Thirty. It's the thirtieth anniversary."

"Thirty," she agrees. "That was a clean war. As wars go. I mean, we were fighting a madman. Someone who wanted to set the world on fire. Anyone who fights someone like that is a good guy. It didn't matter, when we were fighting, who'd been on which side before."

"It didn't last," he guesses.

"Nothing lasts." She clasps his hand. "Nothing lasts, Yasha."

The way she's turned, he can see the nameplate on her uniform. He frowns, and she smiles as she follows his gaze. Her smile's more bitter than her tears were.

"The divorce hearing was yesterday. They gave me the new uniform this morning. Good thing it's Victory Day. One day I can drink all day."

He has not seen Alek since his last cryo-sleep, but he has triggered memories, and in them Aliana's smiling.

"Guy must be blind."

"Maybe I'm blind." She hiccups. "Twenty years. I'm old, Yasha. I'm an old woman and I've wasted three decades."

"You haven't," he tells her. "Come on. You have the girls. And you're the best psychologist in the whole damn KGB."

She leans forward to hug him, and he uses the momentum to sweep her down to the gallery. She doesn't even hit him for it, just pokes at his chest.

"Did you bring my shopping from London?"

"Ballerina Barbie doll and the big Lego Duplo set," he says promptly. Nadia's little girl is four, and the boy is two and the apple of his grandmother's eye. "In your office."

"Thank you. Now, I need a drink."

The vodka's still flowing downstairs, and the music's turned modern in the evening. The technicians and agents are mellowed and possibly pickled by now. Yakov has to change directions four times to reach Aliana once she's done talking to the General. He even gets a nod of approval before Karpov turns to leave.

"Does the lady dance?" he asks her.

She laughs and hands him her bottle. "I don't see any lady!"

"C'mon, it's Victory Day. Give a soldier a dance."

"Ill-advised," she says. "But I've always ended up dancing with the wrong people."

He catches her arm as the next song starts, something quick about traveling through the Union. She laughs as she spins, then wraps her arms around his neck.

"I think I'll be all right," she tells him. "It's all right as long as I can laugh."

"And dance," he insists.

When she smiles, he sees another flash, a much younger woman throwing paper balls at him as he distracts her from the approach of a dashing young man in a lieutenant's uniform. He names this flash memory, like the ones he saw in London, like the ones he saw on the way from the airport, like the one when he saw the flag as he passed the American embassy. He pulls her close enough to smell her scent, orange and coriander and vodka.

"You're a hell of a dame and don't let anyone tell you otherwise, pal."

She goes rigid in his arms, then she throws her head back. In the dark room, her eyes are very wide, surrounded by faint lines of anger and laughter.

He lets go when she pushes against his chest. She's swaying, reaching for the gun that isn't at her side, and he tries to remember what he said. He can't even recall the language, or the smell, and it feels like it should be cordite and gun oil, a shooting range under a building in Whitehall and a woman who was taller, stronger, younger, a woman with her face on the lid of a compass.

A woman in a red dress.

Her face fades into Aliana again, Aliana who is still looking at him even as she talks to one of the technicians, her hand white around the guy's arm. Around them, whispers are spreading like ripples on a lake.

"Zvezda," he says. "Zvezda, help me?"

She nods, still keeping eye contact.

Four people grab him from behind. He's thrown on the floor, an empty bottle inches from his face, a broken glass cutting into his hand. The needles in the back of his neck go too deep, too painful, and he whimpers even though he's trying so very hard to be good.

He kicks his legs forward, then jumps up. The men holding him scatter.

The radio is still playing. My address, the Soviet Union. There is blood running down his hand.

"Sleep," Aliana says. Her back is pressed against the wall. There's a broken bottle in her hand.

He can feel the ice flowing down his veins. He kneels at her feet, where it's safe.

"Yes, Zvezda," he says before everything goes dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soyuz 11 is real: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_11
> 
> The Winter Soldier going walkabout in Brooklyn is comics canon (Brubaker Captain America run, #11).
> 
> Joe Turner is the name of Robert Redford's character in the spy classic Three Days of the Condor.
> 
> This is the coat Aliana's wearing while meeting him: http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/0000101397-001/givenchy-autumnwinter-19731974-collection


	5. REVOKE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end of the road.

There is a glass case on the hallway wall, displaying newspaper clippings. There has been a record harvest in the Ukraine. Comrade Gorbachev sends his congratulations.

He reads and re-reads the clippings, letting the man's voice wash over him. He wonders if it's a script, if they go over it each time he wakes. Behind his eyes, the information seeps into his brain, fitting into the holes from which cryosleep removed it.

"Your codename is the Winter Soldier," the man says.

"You said my name was Barsky."

"Winter Soldier is the name of the project." The man smiles. He has not introduced himself, but the name plate on his uniform reads Bezukhov. He is about forty, dark-haired, with a mustache. "Yakov Ivanovich, you are the soldier who fights through the Russian winter, which historically is when we defeat our enemies."

Yakov considers this. He remembers little, and the man has told him less, but he can use his wits (logic, soldier) to fill in the blanks.

"What is my mission?"

That appears to be the right thing to say, because the man nods in relief before reaching for a manila folder. There are several typed pages of summary - habits, known contacts, family tree - before the first photograph.

The woman is about sixty years old. Her skin bears the marks of age, alcohol and cigarettes, as well as deeper shadows on her cheekbones. She has graying, permed hair and brown eyes that stare at the camera in a challenge above full lips. The way her cheeks hollow, he guesses she's missing some back teeth. Her uniform is unmarked, but the caption says colonel.

"She was the chief psychologist of the Red Room," Bezukhov says. "About six years ago, she was put in charge of designing a new program to train the perfect operatives. She was the architect, since she had advocated for something similar for years - taking blank slates and making sure they had both the skills and the conviction to do what's right."

"Blank slates?" Yakov asks.

"Children. Carefully selected, in many cases created by in vitro fertilization from handpicked parents and carried to term by other women. Someone else was in charge of the biological arm of the operation, and he decided that his boss's parameters and reproductive record - as you see, she had three girls who all finished university with top grades - were perfect for the Black Widow program."

"She looks too old for it."

Bezukhov shrugs. "They managed. The father was a ballet dancer thirty years younger than her. I heard she was screwing him at the time, or maybe she started screwing him after, it doesn't matter. The girl was born last year, perfectly fit, and placed in the creche in preparation for the indoctrination program the colonel designed. It starts on their first birthday," he explains. "The oldest girls are five and they can take your head off while reciting Pushkin. I'm not a doctor, but they tell me this baby has the genetic potential to be the best of them."

Yakov nods. He doesn't think more is required of him at the time.

"Everything was fine, regular, no warning signs. The colonel always spent a lot of time in the creche, apparently she likes babies. Then six weeks ago she disappeared with the kid. I was working on the other side of the building, so they pulled me in as an non-involved party. I found out there were documents missing, funds pulled, computers wiped. She must have been working on her getaway for months, since the kid was born."

"She is my mission?" he asks.

"Getting the kid's your mission. The state's put a lot of money into her. One piece, undamaged. The colonel's... expected collateral damage."

Yakov closes the file.

"I was chasing her myself," Bezukhov says. "The family's a dead end, first husband's dead, she divorced the second a decade ago, kept in contact with the daughters but never said anything about work and didn't say goodbye. String of lovers, all dumped the moment they started to bore her. She drinks, but who doesn't drink. All of that's in the file, all my dead ends. I'm hoping you can do better."

He looks up. "You have something else to say."

Bezukhov tugs at his mustache. "She'd been here for forty years. Longer than anyone, now. I just hope you're as good as your file says. You have to be, to win against Aliana Vladimirovna."

*

With the file in his hand, Yakov has more information about his target than he has about himself.

What he does know about himself is that he was assigned to this mission - and pulled, at considerable investment of time and money, out of cryogenic storage - after Bezukhov and his men spent at least four weeks chasing his quarry. This tells him that his own track record must be better. His skills must be better.

He can rely on the facts in the file, probably. He can't rely on Bezukhov's conclusions. If they were right, he wouldn't be hearing them.

The facts include a lack of leads on Aliana Vladimirovna's current location. Her looks could be disguised easily enough, and her position means access to false documentation was not a problem. All international flight data has been analysed, all border guards alerted, but even assuming she did not take advantage of smugglers to cross the border - and he thinks that would require more trust in others than he can read in her file - that leaves him with seventeen million square miles to search.

He has use of half a dozen men, eager ensigns and lieutenants that look younger than he does, which means the age difference has to be even larger, taking cryosleep into account. He starts calling them boys in in his head.

He leaves the boys outside the Surikov Institute, prey to the art students smoking cigarettes in front of the building. He finds the sculpting studio where the files said it would be. A sketchbook and a window provide the cover he needs to observe. His fingers shape themselves around the pencil like he knows how to draw.

The youngest daughter is working in clay, half scale, adding aluminum foil at random. Something fanciful, not the official monumental works. A scarecrow of a woman crawling on the ground, over a glittering field of mines or snow or stars.

When a gaggle of girls descend to drag their Masha to coffee, cheer her up and get her away and tell her about the handsome boys with their black car, he walks closer to observe.

The sculpture has holes instead of eyes.

"She doesn't know where her mother is," he tells the boys as they drive away.

*

Three of the names in his target's file have thick files of their own.

He opens the dead man's folder in the car. He spends a long time staring at the photograph. Leonid Konstantinovich Kalinin has pale northern eyes and narrow lips. Across thirty years, he stares at Yakov with recognition.

Photographs do not move, Yakov tells himself. Photographs do not spit blood.

The file tells him little, for all its thickness. Exemplary service before the war, including five years as personal secretary to Lavrentiy Beria. A string of medals, both Red Army - Lenino, Smolensk, Grodno - and NKVD, including four citations for discovering sedition and three for capturing enemy agents. Assignment to the Red Room shortly afterwards, with another string of exemplary service. A two-year marriage, one child. The file describes Leonid Konstantinovich's death as malfunction of an experimental weapon.

Yakov makes notes dutifully. He doubts that Aliana Vladimirovna would return to the birth town of a husband three decades dead, but he assigns one of the boys to investigate trains and planes to Murmansk anyway.

*

The ballet academy smells of sweat and floor polish in a way that makes Yakov think of military training. He abandons this thought like all others that lead into the past, trailing off in the fog of his mind.

The missing girl's father is cleaning up after practice in one of the large rooms, the task probably one of his assistant instructor duties. The mirrors on the walls mean that Yakov can't approach unnoticed, but he doesn't expect the man to approach with a smile.

"Hi, this is - just give me a moment-" The man folds the dust rag in three and hangs it on the rail along one wall before holding out his hand. "Pavel. You're Yakov Ivanovich, right?"

Yakov nods, even as he scans the man's file in his mind. Twenty-nine, second month as assistant instructor and still employed by the Bolshoi ballet at the same time, no contact with the state security services except for four months spent visiting Aliana Vladimirovna's bed and one donation of genetic material. No knowledge of the Black Widow program.

"Aliana had a picture of you," Pavel explains. "I guess it must have been a carnival ball - you were in this American uniform, something from the war. Your hair was shorter. She said you helped her in her career. That you were a good friend."

Yakov makes a noncommittal sound. He suspects that if he requests his own file, the request will be denied.

"Is she in trouble? I mean, I talked to the other guy, but I really don't know anything." Pavel turns to look in the mirror. His hair is shaved close to the skull, but it glints red in the afternoon light. "She knew my mother, you know. From Stalingrad. I mean, during the war in Stalingrad."

"Do you remember anything she told you lately?" Yakov asks, choosing the words carefully.

Pavel shakes his head. "I haven't seen her since Victory Day. She came to my mother's grave and drank her health."

*

In the office - something about the layout makes Yakov wonder if the Red Room was once a factory - he picks up the dancer's file again. His mother was Ludmilla Pavlovna, dead these two years. He knows the image flashing through his mind is fancy: a crowd of somber, black-dressed people, a row of tombstones, and a woman who detaches from his side to clasp the mourning son's hands. In his fancy, Aliana Vladimirovna smells of bitter orange and coriander.

The next file belongs to a distinguished officer of the KGB. The cover is gleaming; it must have been changed when Aleksander Gavrilovich Lukin was promoted to general. His file tells Yakov even less than Kalinin's, but the spaces between the words tell him this is a very capable man. He wonders why he stayed married to Aliana Vladimirovna for twenty years.

Yakov commits the face to memory. High cheekbones, dark eyes, dark hair barely traced with grey. Danger. Do not approach.

He decides to leave the last file for later. It's getting dark enough to visit the next person on his list.

*

He finds her in the din of a garage converted into a rock club. He leaves his boys at the door; the punks and students are giving them looks enough. Yakov knows how to blend, and his American English gets delighted smiles from the girls who try out lines from songs he doesn't know.

Aliana Vladimirovna's eldest daughter is perched on a speaker, laughing at two men arguing in front of her. Yakov doubts any of them can hear what the others are saying, but that doesn't stop the woman from preening or the men from posturing. He thinks they may be students, young and very drunk, provincial boys deafened by the music that was banned months ago and blinded by the American denim the woman is wearing.

Nadezhda is older than the boys in front of her, but in the dim light she doesn't look over thirty, nor mother of three. Her short hair is dyed a straw blonde that goes well with her father's eyes. Leonid Konstantinovich Kalinin's photograph had him wearing a uniform hat, but Yakov suspects his hair was blond, too. But there's nothing military about the way she's curled up, graceful and languid, enjoying the fact the boys are about to come to blows.

She doesn't look like the woman in the photographs taken six months ago, bloody and unconscious on a hospital bed. Yakov asked for the file of her then-lover, but Bezukhov shrugged in a way that told him everything. Nadezhda may be a flighty music fan making do with occasional translation assignments, but she is also the child of two high-ranking KGB officers and the stepdaughter of a general. He wonders if that has anything to do with the fact she's here, playing at being a student, and not with her children.

Yakov runs a hand through his hair. He can't question Nadezhda in this din, but it shouldn't be hard to get her to go outside with him. Pretend to be an American lost here, with her one of the few people who can speak English beyond song quotes. Put an arm around her, she must be cold. Don't look too close where the makeup is covering the scars. Call her Nadia.

Then the pieces come together. Her, here, with the music and the life and scars that are a clear denial, a teenage rebellion that's going on two decades. She won't know where her mother is, he knows. She hates her.

He turns, and looks into brown eyes. There's half a moment where his instincts fire, metal clenching, before he notices the dark hair and clear skin and height.

Aleksandra Lukina, sister to Masha and Nadia, has her mother's eyes and her father's easy smile. She takes his shoulder, drawing him out of the crowd, toward the door. He follows. Both of them match their steps to the music, blending in with well-trained tradecraft. From the outside it might look like dancing.

"Yakov Ivanovich," she says when a wall separates them from the worst of the din. "Alek said you were active."

Alek is Aleksander Gavrilovich, her father. Yakov can't remember where he read that she uses Alya, not Sasha. He'd left her file for last, and all he saw was the annotation in Alek's file, twenty-six and a full lieutenant in the KGB.

"You came to see your sister?" he hazards.

She nods. "She promised to come home. The kids are waiting."

"Has she been all right?" he asks. "Since the hospital. Since Aliana Vladimirovna left."

Alya smiles, close enough to lean against him. She still has a hand on his shoulder, along the joint of metal and flesh under his jacket. "She's getting there. She just needs people to take care of her. That's always been Alek and me. He's on his way too."

"People are starting to worry about Aliana Vladimirovna. I worry."

"She'll be all right. She's a star."

There's something about the way she says it - star, zvezda - that sets off a sharp pain behind his eyes. His skin is cold, clammy. He stumbles back, letting the crowd carry him away, pushing through faster than she can follow.

*

Back in the Red Room, he climbs to the highest gallery level with his stack of files. The physical exertion steadies his breath. He is here, he is now, and he has his mission.

He finds his explanation in Aliana Vladmirovna's file, in the old pages he overlooked on his first scan. White Star, Belaya Zvezda, was her codename during the Battle of Stalingrad. She started off as a scout for one of the army snipers, then picked up his rifle when an enemy sniper killed him. She was a regimental pet at first, the girl with the rifle as big as she was, but she kept on shooting into the winter, racking up three dozen confirmed kills. There's even a photo, two girls trying to match recruitment poster poses, one of them small like a child with a sniper rifle, the other a little taller and older in a tank battalion's uniform. Aliana Vladimirovna and Ludmilla Pavlovna.

The boys here, they don't understand. Where did he hear that?

Then he hears something else. A telephone ringing in one of the rooms. It's past midnight, and there are no lights on this floor. This may be important. A contact, a mission, something that should be handled.

The lock takes only a little pressure to open. It's a briefing room, dusty and unused. Under the dust, the telephone is red.

"Hello," he says as he picks up the receiver.

"It's good to hear you, American."

He doesn't remember the voice. He has no reason to remember the voice. The image in his head is sharp eyes, high cheekbones, a graying beard modeled on Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

"This is Karpov. Do you remember me?"

Yakov remembers all he reads. Brigadier General Vasily Karpov was in charge of the Red Room from its creation in 1946 to his retirement two years ago, Aliana Vladimirovna's immediate superior during all this time, Aleksander Gavrilovich's until his move to another service branch in 1971.

"Comrade General," he says.

"Good. Good. So, they got you out of cold storage to look for our Aliana?"

"I read that you retired."

The laugh crackles down the telephone line. "Don't believe everything you read. They have me in Lebanon now, keeping my hand in. I tried to take you along, but Aliana insisted I didn't know how to take care of you properly. Too bad, you'd like it here. A lot of sun and not much to do."

"It sounds pleasant," Yakov hazards. "Did you keep in touch with Aliana?" He stops himself consciously from adding the patronymic that brought puzzlement to both Pavel and Alya's eyes. Whoever Aliana Vladimirovna was, they were clearly on personal-name terms.

"Now and then. Now and then. Her and other people. Listen, you're not seriously looking for her? You know how that ends."

"How?"

The laugh, again. "Blood in the snow. She's always been like that, but she's never been a traitor." A pause. "She's the second on my list of people most loyal to the Motherland, after Alek. So whatever she's done, she's not going to make trouble."

"She made trouble already," Yakov says, picking every word carefully.

"I heard. That was personal. Personal, that ends up with blood, but she knows when the personal stops. She ever tell you how she became a sniper, back in Stalingrad?"

He shakes his head, then realizes the man can't see him. "No, General."

"She was an orphan, the guys from that battalion thought she was cute. Fourteen, she turned fifteen before the battle was over. She wanted to help, so they let her scout for a guy who was a good sniper but didn't know the city. She knew every rock of it. So they made a good team, until a German sniper shot him in the head. She told me how she avenged him, when I asked her to convince me to take her on. She crawled right across the German lines, found the guy and shot him point blank, so he'd know what it was about. Then she took his rifle and went right back to shooting Germans."

"Good tradecraft," Yakov says, and he feels like he's quoting the man on the other end of the line. "But six weeks ago, that was bad tradecraft."

"Not that bad," Karpov says. "The reason no-one investigated her in Stalingrad was because all the guys from the battalion thought she was their kid sister. Right now... I'm retired. Alek isn't. Edvin isn't. She's got friends. That's important. A man has to have friends."

"Are you giving me an order?"

"A suggestion." That laugh again. "That's what Aliana always nagged me about, how you respond better to suggestions and reason than to orders. Well, now you get to pay her back for thirty-five years of being your guardian angel. So you think about it, American. You talk to my boys, you talk to Alek and Edvin and everyone else. We can settle things."

"I understand, Comrade General."

A click lets him know Karpov is no longer listening. He wonders more at the location of the call than its timing. Aleksander Gavrilovich - Alek - or Alya must have let the General know about both the encounter and his reaction. Is it his habit to come up here when disquieted?

Is it hers?

Another thought chases that one away. The past. This is all about the past, this is all about repeating, paying back, going back to the beginning.

He uses the phone to call his boys downstairs. He needs the schedule of flights to Volgograd, the city that changed its name over two decades before.

Before, it was called Stalingrad.

 

*

 

The statue of the Motherland towers over the skyline. Her sword stretches out towards the sky.

That area of the city is still sparse, with low single-family buildings more suited for a village than a district capital, but Yakov isn't surprised to find that the address his boys located is one of the first tall blocks of flats nearest to the memorial hill.

"It's like people are afraid to build near the hill," he says as the old man pulls the ancient milk truck to a stop. Making conversation is good tradecraft.

"It's the bombs," the man explains. He is about seventy, and has told Yakov he picks up hitchhikers near the airport most mornings. "The bombs and the bones, you find both the moment you start digging. I wasn't here during the war, you know, but I moved here just after it. It took five years for the grass to start growing back properly. This where you want?"

"Yes, thank you."

The old man waves his money away. "I use the gas for driving the milk anyway. You help me stay awake, I help you get to your aunt, we are fine."

Yakov summons Alya's easy smile until the milk truck rattles away. The old man will make his delivery and go home to sleep, not make a report like a taxi driver for Aleksander Gavrilovich to find.

The morning has shrouded the buildings in early-autumn fog. The grass is still green, and a cat keeps a single yellow eye on Yakov as he goes around the building. The chalk diagrams on the pavement indicate the presence of children. And where there are children, there are grandmothers who take care of them.

He waits until the clocks strike six to descend from the roof. He climbs with his feet and metal arm, the flesh one holding a gun. The seventh-floor balcony is cracked open. Inside, a toddler is watching a wolf chase a hare on a television screen. Nu pogodi, the wolf says. Just you wait.

The girl has Pavel's red hair, curling into ringlets, and Aliana's nose.

The woman shuffles into the living room in leather slippers. She's wrapped in a quilted pink bathrobe, with curlers in her hair.

"I made coffee," Aliana says.

 

*

The metal baskets that hold the coffee glasses are embossed with stars and spaceships, a commemorative Gagarin edition. Yakov stirs the grounds, then waits while they fall.

He keeps the gun trained on Aliana, propped on his thigh as he sits at the kitchen table. She's perched on the work surface. She's taking out the curlers from her hair.

She looks a decade older than the photo in her file. It's hard to distinguish which of the shadows under her eyes are frostbite and which are too much drink and too little sleep. Veins show at her hands and ankles.

"You knew I was coming."

She tips her head back, shaking out the sparse gray curls. "I thought you'd be earlier. Did they give it to Bezukhov? He always underestimates women."

He makes a quiet sound, neither confirmation or denial.

"How long did it take you, Yasha, since they gave you the mission? Since they realized they're not finding me with anything but my own tools?"

"Four days," he says. "You're drunk."

"I've been drunk for seven weeks. You're supposed to be drunk at a wake." She grins, still looking at the window. "We were all drunk during the war, when we could get the booze. It makes the waiting easier. It makes the cold hurt less."

He stirs the coffee again. "Why?"

"You want to know, Yasha? It's safer not knowing. You'll forget anyway, the next time they freeze you. You'll only remember in dreams."

"Dreams make us human," he says. He feels like he's quoting someone, again. Someone young, small, just as angry as her but more willing to fight for it.

"To be human is to be in pain," she counters.

He lets the spoon drop, a clear ringing sound as it hits the rim of the glass. She curls up on herself, tugging the sides of the bathrobe tighter. The four steps across the kitchen take her years, but in the end she's sitting on the other side of the table, facing him even if her eyes are closed.

"I've always taken things," she says. "Taken and taken, and I told myself I wasn't paying, I'd never pay. Then only one little thing, two small favors, four. I didn't realize when I sold my soul away."

He places the gun on the table between them. They both know he can reach it before her hand even starts to move. "Why here?"

"It started here. I started taking here. It was so simple, killing someone."

"The man who killed your partner?"

She looks up. For a moment, the lines on her face disappear under a sharp grin. "I killed my partner. The sheep-fucker had his hand down my shirt the moment we were alone, didn't care I was fourteen. They knew the shot came from the German side, but they never found out who pulled the trigger." She takes a long breath that brings age back with it. "I killed later, directly and at arm's length. I caused pain, too. And I never saw people around me hurting before they had enough and left. I'm done now. I'm done, here."

"You were my handler," he says. "You are a psychologist. Could you stop me?"

"I could delay you," she admits. "I could confuse you. I've done it before. I'm done with it."

"Done with me?"

She spreads her hand palm-up on the vinyl tablecloth. Her skin is grey and mottled against the bright flowers.

"No. I need you."

"You're betraying the Motherland."

"The KGB," she says. "Fuck them. Do you know what they're doing? Making deals for money. So much for communism. In the end we're running out of money, and even state security's willing to screw Nazis to get some."

He frowns. Does she use that word because of where they are, because of the bones under that hill?

"They're still here," she says. "They went underground, worms digging their way under skin. They want to control the world and decide who lives and who dies. They've been buying what the KGB's selling. They even made an offer to buy you."

Yakov's fingers clench, on the metal hand.

"I can't escape," she says. "In here, there's the KGB. Out there, there's SHIELD, walking corpse with worms in the brain. There's no way to get away from both of them while I'm alive."

She knocks the coffee back in two large gulps. The grounds catch between her teeth.

"It's a siege. Armies on each side and civilians in the middle. The world is Stalingrad now, and I've seen too much to believe in one side in my age. Back in the battle, when someone broke, had enough, do you know what he'd do?"

He shakes his head.

"He'd climb to the top of a defense line, in a uniform, and wait. I'd see them through my scope sights. Pale and starved and you know what? A few of them saw the light off my scope and they'd wave. They'd wave and ask me to put them out of their misery."

She shudders.

"I thought about them, and never thought about doing that. I was the one with my hands on a rifle I took from a dead man, the one who'd survive, the one who'd go on. It took me forty years to realize how brave they were. Forty years to climb to the top of my trench line and wave."

He considers it carefully. "This isn't a simple way."

Aliana grins. "I like my spotlight and my applause. I always thought I'd be a primaballerina if not for the famine and the war."

"Tell me about the girl."

He doesn't have to say more. His memory is full of mist, but he remembers that smile.

"She's perfect," she admits. "She's got the best genes, the best skills, the best upbringing I could program for her. She'll be the jewel in the crown, the best weapon the KGB will have in the fight for power. And when they gamble everything on her, what I did over the last six weeks will set her free."

"You're gambling," Yakov says. "Dice."

She shrugs. "I've played chess my whole life. Time to change the game."

"Why?" He picks up the gun, puts on the safety and starts taking it apart. He isn't going to use it. Too loud, with the child in the next room. "Why tell me? Why not walk off the roof and let me find the child in an orphanage?"

"Because I have debts. If my life's a ledger, it's all on the credit side." She reaches into a pocket of her robe. Metal between her fingers. A dog tag, death medal, crumpled and then straightened out with pliers, the name obliterated. "I owe you most of all."

"I don't want it," he growls. The pieces of the gun fall around his feet. "I want me. Give me back."

"Yasha," she whispers. "Yasha, Yasha, there isn't anything to give."

He's on his feet, hauling her up by the shoulders, and she wraps her arms around his waist.

"You're dead." Her voice breaks, muffled in his jacket. "You were dead before I saw you. Your friends are dead, your parents, your sister died two years ago. You're not him anymore. We took the bones of James Barnes and we built you."

"James," he says, shaping the name between his tongue and his teeth. "Jimmy?"

She lifts one hand. Her finger traces a B on his cheek. "Buck. That's what they called you. Buck, or Bucky."

He shakes his head, praying for a flash of memory like her eyes, like her name, like the coffee.

"You can't. It's the damage from the war, scars in your brain. I've let you go on far too long sometimes, and you never remembered anything but dreams and pain, until you were in fugues that had you seeing ghosts. He's gone, Yasha. He's at peace."

He bows his head until it's resting on her shoulder. He feels her fingers carding through his hair.

"I want to be at peace," she whispers. "Please, Yasha?"

She's heavy and out of shape, but his metal arm barely registers the weight. He carries her to the white-tiled bathroom. She pushes off the robe, and she's laughing, or making a sound like laughter, and underneath she's wearing a nightshirt spattered with baby food and stained with nicotine and when he tries to help her, it comes apart in his hands.

She wraps her arms around his neck. He puts his human arm around her, skin to skin. His jacket is missing, his shirt cuffs unbuttoned. She's taking short, sharp breaths as he runs metal fingers up her spine, until his hand is resting against the neck vertebrae.

When her lips touch his neck, he tightens his hold.

 

*

 

Downstairs, the cat gives him an unimpressed look again. In his arms, the girl giggles and points at it.

"Kitty," he tells her.

His boys don't have time to get out of the car before a second black Volga pulls to a sharp stop. The woman behind the wheel has a lieutenant's stars. The man in the passenger seat is a brigadier general. They have the same dark hair, the same cheekbones.

Alya is crying as she points a gun at him.

"You promised," she says, and she sounds all of eight years old. "You promised."

Yakov only shakes his head to indicate to his team to stay inside the car.

Aleksander Gavrilovich Lukin is unarmed. He looks a decade older than that gleaming new photo in the file.

"Zvezda?" he asks.

Yakov shakes his head again.

"Make him put her down," Alya calls out. "I'll make him dance."

"No," Lukin says. "It's over. We're too late."

"It was too late six weeks ago," Yakov tells him, because the dead woman upstairs left enough damage in her wake. "It was too late forty years ago."

Lukin closes his eyes, and that expression is familiar. A dark upper gallery. Stars drawn in ballpoint, on a piece of grey paper, because that shape would always be there somewhere, like she was always there somewhere.

"Alek, she wanted it this way," Yakov says. "None of us could save her from herself."

Alya lowers the gun, though she doesn't holster it. Lukin hugs her, briefly, before they both pass Yakov and go into the building.

Upstairs, Aliana Vladimirovna is lying on fresh sheets on the bed, wrapped in a white nightgown, with her hair a halo she never earned. The air is thick with her scent, bitter orange and coriander, from the bottle called Krasnaya Moskva.

It took him two hours, with interruptions to feed the child and sit her down in front of endless reruns of that show where the wolf always chases the hare, the only words being the occasional "nu pogodi", now just you wait. He wonders if whoever writes that show will ever let the hare kill the wolf and lay him out for burial.

The girl wraps her arms around his neck as he carries her to the car. Her hair is a cloud of red in front of his eyes.

Above them, over a hill full of bones, the Motherland stretches out her sword.


	6. RECALL

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 2015, Victory Day

Almost thirty years later, when the man who was Yakov Ivanovich Barsky reads his file, he finally understands the nature of the Winter Soldier reconditioning process. It was not a memory wipe, but a crude training of his consciousness not to dwell on memory. Recall brings pain, so his mind avoids it to the point of being unaware of it. It's like walking along a footpath laid over the marsh, but looking only straight up so that you don't notice the water.

It doesn't stop memories from rising through the surface and stabbing you in the leg.

There is a hill overlooking a road in Iran, and a choice to make. The optimum shot trajectory goes through the woman's stomach and aorta to the conclusion of two dead bodies, but he only leaves one corpse on that road. The decision is not conscious, and the same conditioning - stronger each time, he later realizes, and each time cruder and easier to fracture - keeps him from being aware that it was made. Now that no-one takes care to bring his brain to full operating power, he has no idea that memory triggers exist. He doesn't know what he's fighting for. No-one has the patience to explain it to him in words that are short and calm and comforting, over bitter coffee in a room that smells of cigarettes, except in dreams that he forgets - does not allow himself to remember - upon waking.

The periods between reconditioning and disintegration get shorter, from months to weeks to days. His handlers are puzzled and angry when a trigger rises accidentally. A boy in a red t-shirt with the hammer and sickle leaves him humming the anthem for hours, singing about that banner leading to victory. They're away from the machinery, so they just beat him until he stops.

On the bridge, the glimpse of the red-haired woman's face is his first trigger.

"She's mine."

He doesn't know why he says it. He's not sure which language he's using, but he remembers eyes as fearless as these. Only then does he see the man who is a ghost.

(Months later, after a struggle with his memory that leaves his brain a battleground, she watches him like a hawk watching a dragon. It's only when they're fighting side by side and he announces acquiring his target with "Nu, zayats, pogodi!" that she breaks into a surprised, delighted smile. Later she keeps looking over at him while explaining old Soviet wolf-and-hare cartoons to Wilson, as if she expects him to join in.)

It's been over a year since the carriers fell, and his memory is as good as it will get. His passport says James Buchanan Barnes, and Steve calls him Bucky, while Maria Hill opts for Barnes but doesn't stop him from tagging along when she wants to show off Steve to Stark's contacts in Russia who can be helpful in rooting out HYDRA.

But he'll always be Yakov, too, and it's Yakov who keeps quiet as Hill plans and organizes and swears a blue streak when it turns out that on the day they land, every place of business is closed.

"I know the Russians are big on V-E Day, but World War Two ended on May 8."

"Not in Russia," he says. "May 9, 2AM Moscow Time. I'm going for a walk."

Steve follows him without a word, but with that concerned-citizen look that always makes him roll his eyes. Bucky plays tour guide just enough to distract Steve, pointing out new buildings and places he remembers from a different era. They pass ancient veterans who jangle with medals, and he sees Steve bodily stop himself from saluting.

They share a rueful grin and bump shoulders, then walk on.

The kiosks in front of the cemetery are open, so he gets flowers. He bought the other things at the airport the day before. He's looked up the grave online, too. It's hard to miss, in one of the main avenues, so they push through the crowds around the graves of veterans and heroes.

The grave he wants is freshly washed, the flowers crisp. Someone has put a small bottle of vodka at the foot of the gravestone, and a knockoff Barbie doll in a Red Army uniform.

Bucky crouches down and arranges the doll in a proper sniper position before setting down his own white flowers and bottle. The new packaging of Krasnaya Moskva is better quality, but it still smells the same, bitter orange and coriander.

Then he takes the chalk and draws all over the red star embedded into the gravestone, until it's a white star instead.

When he straightens, Steve is still looking at the stone.

"Who is it?" Steve asks.

"She's the one who wrote most of my file." The one who took his mind apart, he doesn't say. The one who destroyed and created him.

"That name," Steve says. His Russian is still rudimentary, but he's learned to read Cyrillic fairly fluently. "Is she-"

"Yes."

He wonders whether they passed the family on their way here. The bottle must be from Alya, now head of the corporation her father founded after he left the KGB. She doesn't have children, so the doll is from one of Masha's girls. Or Nadia's granddaughter, though Nadia is dead.

"I asked Natasha about it," Steve says. "Whether she tried to find out who her parents were. She said she keeps looking forward."

"Maybe she's on to something," Bucky says. He wraps an arm around Steve's shoulders, feels the jolt that is shock. "Let's go back."

Behind them, they leave the gravestone with its white star and its inscription. Hero of Stalingrad. Aliana Vladimirovna Romanova.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading this story.


End file.
